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Daily Cardiac,
I wonder if you are getting what you want here: a confirmation that you are “right”. Look at us! you spoke about FD (feminine dominance) and here we are jumping all over you! What a great test! we all failed because we ARE under feminine dominance otherwise we woud not be moved so much and be shaken to the roots of our morality….
Do you smile at this? do you shrug your shoulders, do you feel compassion?
I know this is nasty….

You ignored my little discussion of Foppish Dandyism way back when. I guess I must have hurt your feelings by mocking you. Things haven’t changed much. Especially those EARS!!

So instead of Foppish Dandyism, let’s just call it “shame” or “guilt.” These are nominally different but at the level of feeling without description or explanation they are the same thing. People do things because they are expected to do them by significant individuals or the greater culture (guilt). People do things because if they don’t they will feel wrong about themselves (shame).

In the cult you have been taught to call guilt “feminine dominance.” Even if you call it by some sexist ideological term you still have to deal in some way with the feeling when it comes up. Discounting the feeling after naming it and refusing to obey what it tells you still doesn’t achieve a result worth achieving.

The fact is, some things are intrinsically wrong to do. The poo-poo-ca-ca you’ve swallowed all these years excreted by the contemptuous manipulator Gurdjieff, may the sputum accumulate on his grave, is that good and evil acts are relative, and whether they are good or evil is simply a function of your aim. You have allowed yourself to believe this all these years or, charitably, you have allowed yourself to “suspend disbelief” and “verify, verify, verify,” all the while subjecting yourself to the provisional application of this belief to your life on the theory that you are testing out “objective knowledge.” The fact is, good and evil are not relative to your aim. Your aim has nothing to do with it.

And I’m here to tell you, discounting how you feel about something on the premise that guilt or shame are inherently untrustworthy to guide social actions, because one should feel free to take inherently antisocial actions or do deliberately hurtful things as one sees fit, or as some sociopath decrees, why, that’s plain old abdication of personal responsibility. Think of it! If you sufficiently implement an ideology of “non-identification” and reject the notion that you might be intelligently guided by your feelings (including guilt and shame) — why, you probably can be induced to do almost anything.

Obviously there are many who have a vastly different opinion of him than you do. What are you actually saying – that your feeling/beliefs/opinions cancel out the feelings/beliefs/opinions of those who believe in him and consider him their teacher? Isn’t that rather presumptuous of you?

WR – “You make me sick. Your ignorance is indeed revolting.”

Words like these serve no purpose at all other than to prove that your adrenals are in good working order.

Why isn’t it enough to simply state your beliefs/opinions regarding a particular train of thought and let the strength of your logic be enough?

Nothing you say about RB reduces him one iota from his actual and objective status in the grand scheme of things, and nothing I say elevates him one iota from who he really is.

“What he said was that he lost interest in people who leave Influence C.”

The caravan stopped at an oasis just in time for noonday prayers. As the faithful rolled out their prayer rugs and oriented them toward Mecca to begin to pray, they noticed a sufi had rolled out his prayer rug pointing in another direction. The faithful rechecked their bearings and called out to the sufi. “Hey, Mecca is this way, you idiot!” To which the sufi replied, “Point your carpet in a direction that is not toward God!”

“The Buddha said grab hold of those ahead of you and forget about those behind you.”

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Psalm 23:6

“Nothing you say about RB reduces him one iota from his actual and objective status in the grand scheme of things, and nothing I say elevates him one iota from who he really is.”

Actions, my friend, speak louder than words.

You have rightfully placed Burton where he belongs, among the grand scheme of things for he has lost touch with his humanity. He has the morality of a reptile.

“Why isn’t it enough to simply state your beliefs/opinions regarding a particular train of thought and let the strength of your logic be enough? ”

It’s called harmonious development of all the centers as Gurdjieff intended, not just the intellect. Logic has its place. So does jihad. And right now the Sword of Allah is raised above your head.

“The reason I quoted three of your comments is to invite you to notice the fact that you divide everything into ‘warring pairs’ in all of them. I wonder how deeply you realize that these – terms like higher and lower self – are just conventions, inspired improvisations in order to get you to understand that the true source of enlightenment (’What is seeing’?) is beyond all these pairs. Otherwise, spiritual life is just an idea – a pleasing one, but really, just a sophisticated dream-life…”

These are not conventions/inventions of the FoF. These are not “inspired improvisations.” These are “warring pairs”, expressions of the natural law of opposition. The universe is built upon opposition. (Apparently I’ve flunked biology in the eyes of some but I assume I can still dabble in physics.)

There is opposition, there is struggle, there is a conquest of one over another. There can be no higher self but one that rises over the lower self. There can be no beauty without ugliness. The lower self will not escape a wormy grave. It has no motivation to make spiritual efforts. None whatsoever. It thinks there is nothing in the world higher than itself. It doesn’t play fair; doesn’t give the higher self it’s due. It will take Caesar’s share and the Lord’s share if left in charge.

Conversely, there are many ways the lower self helps a higher cause. All of the lower functions can be enlisted in the aim to awaken. But for that to occur one has to know many things; know the Self and what is not the Self.

CT – “the true source of enlightenment (’What is seeing’?) is beyond all these pairs.”

You are perfectly correct when you say this. The Self is non-dual by nature; it is the only thing in nature that is non-dual. It is made in the image of the God. But we arrive at the non-dual through duality, through struggle, through seeing what prevents this non-dual entity from realizing itself and rising above its opposition.

CT, you comment as if I’m speaking Greek. You joined the FoF, you stayed awhile. I assume at one time you embraced these same principles. Did you erase a portion of your memory bank when you left? Is that part of your coping process?

It’s a tendency on the blog for some to re-write the history of the spirit world when they leave the FoF, and reduce the entire canon of sacred writings to “inspired improvisations” of the FoF, mere Burtonisms.

I’ve heard of throwing out the baby with the bath water, but some of the propositions on the blog take this cliche to new heights.

“Conversely, there are many ways the lower self helps a higher cause. All of the lower functions can be enlisted in the aim to awaken. But for that to occur one has to know many things; know the Self and what is not the Self.”

This is about the first time you have admitted this in any form. Progress. Now you can go further and replace the ‘can’ in ‘can be enlisted’ with ‘must’, for that is the reality of the situation… There is no way in which you can desire presence consistently without the co-operation of all the parts in you. Otherwise, you will be like the seed that fell in random parts of the ground – some on the rock, others strangled by weeds…

‘You’ as you are can understand nothing. However your body, given encouragement and an open line of communication, may after a time begin to understand something of what is required – it doesn’t need ‘Your’ interference based on your guesswork about what is and what is not your ‘Higher Self’…

It is a pity you cannot try out some of Gurdjieff’s original ‘Movements’. They have taught me more in one session, about the ‘Wrong work of centres’, than fifty fellowship meetings.

– “CT, you comment as if I’m speaking Greek. You joined the FoF, you stayed awhile. I assume at one time you embraced these same principles. Did you erase a portion of your memory bank when you left? Is that part of your coping process? ”

I left because I wanted to give the principles a deeper meaning, not shuffle them around endlessly on a very pretty mental poker table. But you are speaking Greek, or rather Double-Dutch to me, because I generally don’t feel through your posts that you have identified the organ in you that can really learn the principles you talk about so freely about. All the topics you touch on have an element of rightness, and sometimes more, about them – it is just that they are placed wrongly within.

When you begin to feel that ‘You’ are nothing but a living, burning question… and actually nothing more than that, not a single iota more, then the principles will start to mean something concrete within your body and being. Give up this belief in the ‘Higher Ego’, and see where ‘You’ stand then…

Do you honestly think that what will survive you at your death will have any trace of ‘You’ in it? Do you believe that all your spiritual efforts would have any point if this was the result?

Most of the people on this Blog have experienced a sense of both Robert Burton’s ‘rightness’ and his ‘wrongness’. If there were not that double feeling, the Blog could not have continued so long and so strongly! It is because they (we) have had to struggle so hard to disentangle their sense of their own possibilities from RB’s web…

My feeling is that there are times and places where Robert Burton comes very close to being right, almost in despite of himself. We all know the ‘bathing in finer energies’ experience that can arise at his meetings (even if he is not there), or the ‘noble thoughts’ and now, images, that accompany them.

But as he told that student who asked him the question, noble thoughts can often bar the way to being present to what is in front of you. Ironic in itself, when we think of the enormous host of noble thoughts and images with which he has hedged himself round nowadays…!

A couple of years ago, I came across a wonderful thought from Ibn Arabi that has proved very useful since. He said, “If something creates a trace of doubt in you, you must put it aside as if it were wrong.” Gurdjieff says something similar about ‘impure’ thoughts and emotions, ones that have a quantity of rightness in them, but traces of corruption from elsewhere, and hence are not completely sincere.

Lots of rightness, but powerful veins of impure behaviour and understanding pulsing the blood around the body of the fellowship. I don’t feel we need to lose either side of the ‘bargain’ in our understanding of what we experienced there.. but being doubtful, it has to be left aside.

Thank you again, Lauralupa, for that terrific last post. You have a way of stripping things back to the bone, both lucidly and sympathetically. Hat is off again.

CT “My feeling is that there are times and places where Robert Burton comes very close to being right, almost in despite of himself….”

You know what they say about a stopped clock….

DC I don’t think you a ‘brave soul’ as whalerider put it, I think you are delusional and from the outside your delusions make you appear pitiful and here’s why: you are trapped in a box, it is a trap of your own making and you don’t realize you are trapped. I have to hand it to you though, one way to interpret your continued posting here is that you are struggling to break free of the trap. But part of your struggle is to keep the tattered box surrounding you intact and that makes your efforts here seem pitifully sad, futile.

One of the walls of your trap is this polarized view of the world that’s distorting your perceptions. (You might do well to familiarize yourself with a hindu concept; ‘neti neti — The purpose of the exercise is to negate conscious rationalizations and other distractions from the purpose of a meditation…. We can never truly define God in words. All we can say, in effect, is that It isn’t this, but also, it isn’t that either’). Someday you may be able to break through the cold wall of black and white which you keep bumping into here, it’s a great big universe beyond the confines of your prison, someday you may be able to perceive the beauty of colors and the subtlety, nuance and range in shades of grey…. believe me, I know how difficult it is to change, it is literally a type of death. Many of us here suffered with some of the same delusions you expose and the sad fact may be that some people trapped in their delusion may never ‘wake-up’– but don’t give up hope DC…. hope is what your continued posts represent. Apparently I haven’t given up hope even though it may seem ‘almost impossible for a hypnotized, mind-controlled, illogical, desensitized, or psychopathic person to be aware of their own error or dementia.’ You can break free but not without help… I think that is what the blog is about.

We might examine this limited polarized perception you are trapped by and thereby reveal some things you should know to aid in your escape — this is ‘psyc 101,’ very basic stuff… to paraphrase something written earlier; ‘the human ego is little more than a mass of defenses… your defenses operate to secure the image that you have of yourself, even if the image has been largely implanted by external authorities. The ‘Super-Ego’ is regarded as the psychic representative of external authority and interestingly, its nature is binary. There are permissive defenses and prohibitive ones and, like most biotic functions, they operate unconsciously.’

It’s obvious that the programming of the FOF represents an external manifestation of authority, and ‘conscious Bob’ represents THE authority figure for you, it’s all a projection of your own ‘super-ego.’ What does that indicate about the state and functioning (or malfunction) of this part of your own psyche’? The binary nature of that function (your malfunction) is reflected in the polarization of your perceptions…. think about it, it may be one clue to the way out of your box.

I know, I’ve been there too, membership in your little cult can be very comforting, it fosters and supports the delusion that your little clique is ‘special’ and as a member that you stand above ‘the masses.’ What absolute malarkey! I know, I’ve been there, done that, ‘conformity is very comforting, doing what everyone else does and thinking as everyone else thinks is psychically elating, It is your satori to obey and conform, and to be in the company of those people who do likewise, and as long as you do not think of your conformity as conformity, as long as your identification and allegiance is complete your life can proceed relatively untroubled,’ that’s one reason it’s so difficult to escape your trap.

DC, #6
You say:
“There is opposition, there is struggle, there is a conquest of one over another. There can be no higher self but one that rises over the lower self. There can be no beauty without ugliness. The lower self will not escape a wormy grave. It has no motivation to make spiritual efforts. None whatsoever. It thinks there is nothing in the world higher than itself. It doesn’t play fair; doesn’t give the higher self it’s due. It will take Caesar’s share and the Lord’s share if left in charge.”
– and –
“The Self is non-dual by nature; it is the only thing in nature that is non-dual. It is made in the image of the God. But we arrive at the non-dual through duality, through struggle, through seeing what prevents this non-dual entity from realizing itself and rising above its opposition. ”

If you believe in struggle you create it anew each time you oppose. This is a really fundamental law of (human) existence. Acceptance, inclusion, and transformation are the way out, my friend. And I know you know this, somewhere in your heart of hearts, but your intellect and emotions haven’t caught up yet. Start running?

Words like these serve no purpose at all other than to prove that your adrenals are in good working order.

Why isn’t it enough to simply state your beliefs/opinions regarding a particular train of thought and let the strength of your logic be enough?

Is there a virtue, a value, to the communication of the experience of disgust? I say, yes. Disgust has a place in the choir of human emotion. We have to let other people know if something nauseates us. If they have ears to hear, maybe they stay away and so avoid getting sick themselves.

14 Jomo P.
Is there a virtue, a value, to the communication of the experience of disgust? I say, yes. Disgust has a place in the choir of human emotion. We have to let other people know if something nauseates us. If they have ears to hear, maybe they stay away and so avoid getting sick themselves.
———
thank you Jomo Pinata!

I remember thinking in 2006, about a year before I left the FOF, that even though I was become disillusioned and disappointed with Burton’s “teaching”, it would be worth staying just to see what’s going to happen when he dies. How many current members are sticking around just to see what’s going to happen when burton is dead?? I bet DC is one of them.

The interesting thing about Lacuna’s reaction to WR’s disgust is that Lacuna assumes the expression of disgust is valueless. Really he takes it as a given. Imagine thinking that sound is valueless because you’ve decided to plug your ears and to devalue anything coming in through that portal.

That’s the problem with packaging value judgments about the worthlessness of negative emotion as ideological statements of fact. The ideological proposition of worthlessness accorded the perceptions which may accompany a particular emotion damned as “negative” is simply not open to examination.

As in, “You mean, you are saying that negative emotions have value? Absurd! Nonsense! Away with you! I cannot abide lunacy!”

But the truth is that ideology, while one has fallen under its sway, just seems to be “common sense.”

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” –Albert Einstein. Surely, Lacuna, you have overcome some of the prejudices you held at eighteen!

DC “These are not conventions/inventions of the FoF. These are not “inspired improvisations.” These are “warring pairs”, expressions of the natural law of opposition. The universe is built upon opposition. (Apparently I’ve flunked biology in the eyes of some but I assume I can still dabble in physics.)”

Yes, they are the eternal female-male principle dear and they are not meant to separate but to unite, to be wholy and holy penetrated by each other so that they both realize themselves.

DC “The lower self will not escape a wormy grave. It has no motivation to make spiritual efforts. None whatsoever. It thinks there is nothing in the world higher than itself. It doesn’t play fair; doesn’t give the higher self it’s due. It will take Caesar’s share and the Lord’s share if left in charge.”

Are you talking about your self and Robert? Or the Fellowship and humanity?

You’ve brought a great idea for discussion Daily Cardiac, the idea of Robert Burton!

In his first line Robert needs to be surrounded by the men he is preying on. Is this hunting behaviour the conscious behaviour that you mean?

In his second line or inmmediate relationships, the condition is that people serve him unconditionally. If we look at Robert’s relationship with people like Ed Schult… or Girard it is clear that there is nothing emotional about it.

I challenge you to give me one example of “friendhip” in Robert Burton’s life without dismissing it with the idea that divine beings don’t need friends!

Guinever, are you a friend of Robert?
Rowena?
Robert T.?
Robert Mc I?
Collin, was Robert ever your friend?
How about you Linda, is Robert your friend?
Karen?
Susan?
Sarah?
Asaf?
Mihai?

Did he ever give you anything but your position? Did he cuddle it with nice gifts, clothes? Trips? as long as you were willing to unconditionally serve him without ever showing your own being?

How come Robert Burton does not have a friend in the Fellowship of Friends? And what do we mean by friend? Someone we can rely on?

So in his first line or personal life we hve that circle of men who had nothing to do with the rest of the member and who would go as far a to tell their wives tha tit didn’t matter if they told other they were being hit by them because they were in Robert’s inner circle and nothing would happen to them.

So what morality is this Daily Cardiac? Why don’t you get factual and get out of your theory if your mind allows it?

These men, his intimate consorts, students, whores, servants, assistants, were guglled like balls in the myriad roles in which no matter what they were playing, they lost mainly because they were never given enough space to stand on their own. For how many years did you beg for the acknowledgement to teach your own art, Seiki?
Twenty? Twenty five? And you finally left.

How many men and women were replaced when they tried to offer more than unconditional servicedom? servicedoom?
No one who ever tried to be himself was ever allowed in the Fellowship. Girard? Steven D? Guinevere? Rowena? Robert T? Asaf?
stand only for as long as they can keep the member’s running around Robert’s abuses. How many people have you asked to leave because they questioned his abuses? And yours?

If we look at Robert’s third line or public life, we fina a man playing as divine king. Members are so far below him that he does not deign to speak to them directly nor are they dignified enough to do so.

In terms of responsibility, his servants survive as long as they don’t challenge him. What was the name of that lady who challenged his expenses and was deposed? A blond, thin, elegant woman who left around 95 or before?

So now that we have a glimpse of Robert’s divine style which is nothing but his self serving little kingdom where everyone can be used at his will, why don’t we take a look at what people like you Daily Cardiac are doing in there?

Since it is ABSOLUTELY OBVIOUS that neither one of you have a personal relationship with Robert or a friendship in which you can actually challenge him when it seems fit, then it is clear that your connection is related to your position in the Fellowship not to your allegiance with Robert who at most you confess, if you’re Girard or anyone else, that you simply do not understand and do not try to understand because you’re inferior to him. Girard, Steven D. and the rest can only “hold” their position if they are themselves willing to disappear behind Robert’s skirt. They sold their conscience so thoroughly that by the time they tried to sing their own song, it came out pink, like Robert’s suit. They lost the trace of themselves like Daily Cardiac who once in a while brings out people like Ghandi or Madonna from his own pocket forgetting that Robert banned those from our lives thirty years ago.

The psychology of enablers like Daily Cardiac is connected to the Fellowship not through the emotional center but through the instinctive center. Its the position that holds them inside. It is not the love for Robert or for the members what holds them in place

it is the insitinctive illusion of power what they are sucking on. Since they cannot take any power away from Robert, they get it from disenabling the mass of members, new or old, who are willing to give it to them, by establishing the same realtionship of power that Robert establishes with them in which the member is allowed to function as long as he, she, does it SELFLESSLY.

This “selflessness”, so strongly hammered in the Cult, appealing to the capacity of sacrifice that every normal human being has, is taken to the point to which members replace their self for Robert’s and acting on his behalf becomes their reason to be, assuming all forms of idolatry: Beautify his surroundings, his house, his gardens, his body, his car and the young little whores that have been imported for his personal use.

The naivete of members still at Isis today lies in that they think that they are free to do what they want or that THAT is what they want to do. That as long as they have a little job or role in the bubble they can run along with it without being damaged and not have to go out in to the world to make a living in every sense of the word. But what they cannot measure is that the more they allow themselves to play the comfortable position within the programmed structure they are disenabling their own self.

What we see in the video of the members who went to speak with D. Hawkins is that although these are not people who cannot hold a job in the world, they do and are quite succesful at it, but what is obvious in the video is that these people who have been serving Robert for decades, are begging D. Hawkins to give them a clue of who the fuck they are.

Hawkins treats them with the same mercilessness that Robert treats them after disempowering them. Crouching Tiger’s friend is the story of each student of the Fellowship who walked up to Robert with his or her heart in his or her hand and offered it to him with absolute surrender. Daily Cardiac, Girard, Steven and the rest of you also did that but what you learnt from it was not that Robert was a merciless narcissistic sociopath, what you learnt was to be become like him.

I do not wish you any harm but I do not consider a few years in jail would do you any harm. You need time to think and be, even in jail, free from the Fellowship, if you cannot stop it at your will. You are no different to drug addicts and your addiction is hurting too many people.

Happy polls everyone!
and thanks Mick for reminding us of George Harrison who, unlike George W, will dwell in my (our?) heart until the end (of the beginning)

We were talking-about the space between us all
And the people-who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth-then it’s far too late-when they pass away.
We were talking-about the love we all could share-when we find it
To try our best to hold it there-with our love
With our love-we could save the world-if they only knew.
Try to realize it’s all within yourself
No-one else can make you change
And to see you’re really only very small,
And life flows ON within you and without you.
We were talking-about the love that’s gone so cold and the people,
Who gain the world and lose their soul-
They don’t know-they can’t see-are you one of them?
When you’ve seen beyond yourself-then you may find, peace of mind,
Is waiting there-
And the time will come when you see
we’re all one, and life flows on within you and without you.
one so cold and the people,

Who gain the world and lose their soul-
They don’t know-they can’t see-are you one of them?
When you’ve seen beyond yourself-then you may find, peace of mind,
Is waiting there-
And the time will come when you see
we’re all one, and life flows on within you and without you.

DC 6
There is opposition, there is struggle, there is a conquest of one over another. There can be no higher self but one that rises over the lower self. There can be no beauty without ugliness. The lower self will not escape a wormy grave. It has no motivation to make spiritual efforts. None whatsoever. It thinks there is nothing in the world higher than itself. It doesn’t play fair; doesn’t give the higher self it’s due. It will take Caesar’s share and the Lord’s share if left in charge.
———————————-
You are the star of the blog!

But what you say reminds me of a penitent monk in the dark ages.
How do you experience pleasure of the body?

JP – “So instead of Foppish Dandyism, let’s just call it “shame” or “guilt.” These are nominally different but at the level of feeling without description or explanation they are the same thing. People do things because they are expected to do them by significant individuals or the greater culture (guilt). People do things because if they don’t they will feel wrong about themselves (shame).”

“You have been found guilty of guilt”

This is an interesting quote; I’m not sure of the source, possibly Kafka.

Shame comes entirely from within, while guilt can come from within or from an outside source – one can be “found” guilty. Both are loaded words; probably byproducts of FD, as you suggested.

On the other hand Remorse is a valid and important emotion; especially for those on the spiritual path. Remorse comes from realizing a thought, statement or deed was wrong, inappropriate, hurtful.

True remorse has nothing to do with what another person feels about you, but entirely how you yourself feel about something you did or said. It is the result of conscience “breaking through” to the truth of some moment.

For a spiritual worker remorse must be felt hundreds of times on the journey from darkness to light. That’s because in darkness we are disconnected from truth and many things we attribute to truth only serve our own self centered aims.

The truth of your post #3 in its entirety hinges not on the words you state but on the correct application of them. This is often the case. People utter the truth but cannot live the words they profess.

A lot of people will go to the polls today thinking their vote will make the world a better place but that thought is a fantasy. The world will change, not due to any politician in particular, but simply because change happens.

But if everyone could take their own advise the world would be substantially made better. Sounds simple, but that will never happen.

JP – “Is there a virtue, a value, to the communication of the experience of disgust? I say, yes. Disgust has a place in the choir of human emotion. We have to let other people know if something nauseates us. If they have ears to hear, maybe they stay away and so avoid getting sick themselves.”

This is true, but insulting people will not achieve the desired result. There are noble ways and ignoble ways to express disgust. Insults are abusing the perceived abuser. It perpetrates the endless chain of abuse.

Insults like WR’s comment are made out of frustration, laziness, an inability to control our basest emotions. If we take about three seconds (one deep breath) we can usually come up with a more effective way to communicate.

Insults are also made from unknowing. Some people never figure out that violence only causes more violence. And insults are a form of verbal violence. Suicide bombers are also “disgusted.” People who bomb abortion clinics are “disgusted.”

I’m not putting WR in that catagory, but the difference between him and them is one of degree, not principle. They are both employing the same methods to solve their “problems”, one to the extreme and one in a relatively inane sense.

Thank you for the thought-provoking discussion.
It has been 2 months that I am out of FOF. I feel fine. My vision becomes a little more clear since there is no more brainwashing in my life. However I feel a need of finding a direction or a method and so far nothing worked for me yet. I often ponder upon my lack of direction or will and ask myself what FOF would offer in help – I know it would be “do more sequences” “I’s are not real” and “do more 3d line of Work” “the state is the answer” etc.
The understanding I have now is that the “state” we are taught in FOF is a hypnotic state and not an objective state of consciousness. How strange to find oneself paying for 15 years for awakening and being put to sleep instead!

Shame comes entirely from within, while guilt can come from within or from an outside source – one can be “found” guilty.

I’ll turn to the merit of what you are saying in a moment. On the level of utterance you are mixing up two distinct things: the feeling, the “affect” of guilt, and the “adjudication” of guilt. Leave “adjudication” out of it. We are talking about “affect.” Without meaning to pick on you for this, let me simply say, linguistic sleights of hand such as this are used in the fellowship to circumvent reasoning.

Both are loaded words; probably byproducts of FD, as you suggested.

To be clear, I do not say, suggest or believe that “guilt” and “shame” are “byproducts” of Foppish Dandyism. I think that Foppish Dandyism is an ideological term that carries with it all kinds of false assumptions and value judgments. I believe that “guilt” and “shame” belong to a category of affects that can be described as the “shame family” of emotions. At the level of emotion they belong to the same general category of emotion, but their cause is experienced differently.

On the other hand Remorse is a valid and important emotion; especially for those on the spiritual path. Remorse comes from realizing a thought, statement or deed was wrong, inappropriate, hurtful.

I agree with what you wrote. You may find the following brief video informative:

True remorse has nothing to do with what another person feels about you, but entirely how you yourself feel about something you did or said.

This formulation I also agree with. What I don’t agree with is the following:

It is the result of conscience “breaking through” to the truth of some moment.

This, you see, is where you let ideology come in and condition your perceptions. You have explained remorse causally, in terms of “conscience.” But really it doesn’t explain anything at all. It’s simply a causal fallacy:

For a spiritual worker remorse must be felt hundreds of times on the journey from darkness to light. That’s because in darkness we are disconnected from truth and many things we attribute to truth only serve our own self centered aims.

How about for a human being. It is human beings who experience remorse. It is human beings who fall into fallacy and human beings who rehabilitate themselves out of fallacy. It is human beings who, having fallen into fallacy, come to distrust themselves. It is human beings who, learning they can trust themselves, rehabilitate themselves out of fallacy.

The truth of your post #3 in its entirety hinges not on the words you state but on the correct application of them. This is often the case. People utter the truth but cannot live the words they profess.

Underlying superficial gloss of this utterance is a lack of focus. You refer to “the truth of [my] post #3 in its entirety.” That is, you focus on nothing and segue into a value judgment based on the blurry whole. That’s not dialogue. That’s avoidance of dialogue. That’s retreat.

D.C.
How many of you are there? I hear three distinct voices in you texts with three distinct degrees of intellect. I must say, I like this latest personality the best.

So in the hopes that the more intelligent one will respond, where do you advise the Dogamtic Cardiac personality to draw the line for morality? Or does the line squirm and move. What do you consider immoral?

JP – “Is there a virtue, a value, to the communication of the experience of disgust? I say, yes. Disgust has a place in the choir of human emotion. We have to let other people know if something nauseates us. If they have ears to hear, maybe they stay away and so avoid getting sick themselves.”

LP – This is true, but insulting people will not achieve the desired result. There are noble ways and ignoble ways to express disgust. Insults are abusing the perceived abuser. It perpetrates the endless chain of abuse.

How can you be sure that we agree on the “desired result”? Publicly insulting someone communicates loudly and clearly a social opprobium, not only to the target but to everyone paying attention. Maybe the insult’s target doesn’t change his behavior or opinion right away. But maybe the insult’s target recognizes that in some sense the insult was accurate, and feels sullied as the exhibitor of behaviors that legitimately warrant social opprobium.

Insults like WR’s comment are made out of frustration, laziness, an inability to control our basest emotions.

Again, you express a value judgment in guise of a statement of fact. I ask you, why do believe “disgust” is one of “our basest emotions”? “Disgust” keeps us from taking foul things for nourishment. It is inherently useful. “Disgust” has something important to teach us.

If human behavior, if human example, is intrinsically “disgusting,” and we do not meet it with “disgust,” is it because our capacity for “disgust” has been anaesthetized?

If we take about three seconds (one deep breath) we can usually come up with a more effective way to communicate.

Depends what we want to communicate. “You disgust me” is pretty direct and unmediated. It gets the point across, effectively!

Insults are also made from unknowing. Some people never figure out that violence only causes more violence. And insults are a form of verbal violence.

Are insults a form of verbal violence? I suppose this is sometimes true. I don’t think this is necessarily true. I imagine it’s a question of intent. Words spoken primarily to cause hurt: that’s violence. Words spoken primarily to communicate opprobium: that’s not violence, even if the words have the effect of causing hurt.

Suicide bombers are also “disgusted.” People who bomb abortion clinics are “disgusted.”

Ah, perhaps so, but that does not mean “disgust” has nothing legitimate to contribute to human understanding. That which disgusts us is unfit for human consumption. Surely that is something which has kept our species alive and which warrants our careful attention.

“It perpetrates the endless chain of abuse.”
I’m pretty sure you mean perpetuates.
jx.
However your “master” perpetrates an endless chain of abuse and it branches outwards in time to form a huge tree of abuse which touches hundreds maybe even thousands of families.
But I am also pretty sure that you cannot easily be convinced of this, being stuck with your pink glasses on whenever you look at him.
That will have to be ok.
Perhaps given time……

I get the feeling you are employed to be here as a form of damage reduction.
If so it is kind of counter productive as you are our best example of a person who is stuck where many of us have been previously.
You may change Insh Allah.
Jx

The virtue of courage is intimately connected with the sense of warmth. The heart is not only the perceptive organ for the sense of warmth, but also for courage -or cowardice too.

One of the most important human emotions, anger, lives in the sense of warmth…… anger is the educator of the ego and as long as we remain incompletely developed its role is to rise from the unconscious to mould and correct. Thus we respond to injustice with anger and to make good the injustice that has been committed. When the ego is more developed we are able to make a conscious effort to correct injustices, but if we cannot do this reasonably, then anger helps us.

…The ego develops in the course of human evolution and the power of love grows, but the person who has never been angry will find it exceedingly difficult to develop any real degree of love.
Karl Koning, Living physiology.

In the Fellowship on the contrary, people channeled their anger into silent frustration and impotence. Frigidity, sexual and emotional is just one step further. Indifference became the favorite negative emotion. Indifference to everything and everyone but the idolatry for Robert Burton and pornography or whatever other excess where they can hide it to compensate the imbalance.

Daily Cardiac:“Insults like WR’s comment are made out of frustration, laziness, an inability to control our basest emotions.”

Our? I have no need or desire to be able to control your or anyone else’s emotions, base or otherwise. I have my own emotions to contend with, which I have no problem owning. That ability to control the emotions of others is sought by you and your cult leader. (Your unconscious word choice betrays you…again.)

Since I left the cult and Burton’s sphere, I no longer have a need to control my gag reflex either, also emanating from the “base” emotion of revulsion and disgust of something unpalatable.

Now maybe your cult leader has a hidden, private agenda in controlling his and the gag reflex of others…

The sly man’s pill is not meant to taste bitter.

BTW, rest assured, I do not wish any bodily harm come to you or your cult leader.

I only wish to drain his victim pool, Allah willing.

The violence you feel from my words comes from weed-whacking at the roots of your defense mechanisms that are choking your reason.

I skipped many of today’s posts (scanned, actually, getting the jist only) because of going ‘high’ due to my mood-disorder and not wanting to get ‘bogged down’ in argumentativeness. I am seeing my Crisis Resolution Team tomorrow, just to make sure I do not ‘spin out’ before my exhibition with my students at the studio’s gallery, where I teach my precious metal craft. Someone started the topic of Happiness as separate from Pleasure or Indulgence a few days ago. My feeling now is that Happiness begins when one has found something to which to devote one’s efforts, work and being. Giving others one’s time, attention and patience seems to be the Path to Happiness – One’s Talents with which One has been Graced being given to Humanity and those who One knows will follow and use the Skills. Whitman said “Charity and personal force are the only investments worth anything”. Something to bear in mind as we head towards an inevitable recession – money out the window! May Human Integrity outlast in these times!…..Nigel.

Thank you for being here and hang in there with some of the normal feelings post-FOF.
I wonder if you can talk more about your experiences in the FOF.
Anything. I left a long time ago before the Egyptian phase came into the scene.

I joined FOF in Moscow in 1994. The center director was Ro…t T…r. Unlike Sheik I was very impressed by the meeting led by him and felt very lucky to join the real school I was hoping to find. RB was not important at that time to most of the Russian students. Our main teacher was R.T…r. America was too far and to get there was rather impossible. However I won a green card in 1995 and it was my chance to come to Apollo. I moved to US in 1996. For some reason I believed that at Apollo things will be organized better and the community life will make sense. The survival was very hard: I just went thru the separation with my husband and was left with two little kids. I imagined that salary, rent, school for kids will all somehow be reasonably balanced, but to my surprise LC school cost $750 a month, rent $450 (if I am lucky) and salary – $350. It took me some time to be ready to send my kids to a public school and hope that “negative life people” will not traumatize them right away. Thinking about going off salary was scary too – to work in “life” in a foreign country! Plus the prediction demotivated any attempts to develop a career. The whole preparation to 1998, plus the fire was so frightening! People were buying generators and food, but the only thing I could afford in preparation was a tent I bought in Grocery Outlet. I spent a few nights there with my children to safe ourselves from the earthquake. Luckily it did not happen!

There is not much of the experiences I can tell. I was not close to RB in any way. I was in total imagination about RB’s “friends” until the hell broke loose and the blog came to my attention. Only then I started to realize how totally brainwashed I was. It was a pretty torturous year reading and thinking and debating with my friends, until one day I realized that I don’t have anymore questions and I can not be in the FOF anymore. I left.

I find it uncomfortable to talk about myself, because in FOF talking about oneself is not supported. I guess it is one of those post-FOF feelings.

I have no magic suggestions and would have to admit that one of the best things so far has been the bach flower drops Juan gave me together with St John’s Wort! For the depression I mean. I haven’t been invaded by it for about two weeks and that is pretty amazing when going up and down a roller coaster was the pattern. Maybe the burning did the magic, God knows…

I have noticed that a lot of the discomfort comes from the fact that there is no longer any programming. If you notice your question you can see that this is what you’re asking: What now?
Our lives were programmed in more detail than we realized inside and then being dropped out is like running off the tracks and not knowing where or how to go anywhere else.

I’m no longer looking for a solution because I’ve stopped thinking that it is a problem. I ask myself, what do I want? Nothing… everything, myself, life, integrity, unity, harmony, your happiness, decency. The people that matter seem to be in their own track and doing fine and the ones that need some help are welcome to have it. Life takes care of putting me where it wants me, I don’t have many options to fight destiny or the wish to, do you? And is there anything you want bad enough? Our economies seem to determine the few possibilities and I don’t fight with that determinism. Having some money or not having a lot of it doesn’t seem to solve anything substantial. The question of one’s self continues to be there either way. What do you love? What do you enjoy? What helps you feel that you’ve lived the day? Fighting with friends or made up enemies like with one’s brother and sister when we were children, playing the four first pieces in the guitar still after six months, observing other people’s suffering without judging them, observing other people’s strength without judging myself….

As I talked with the neighbours a little while ago I realized that just being with people around in a popular and unpretentious neighbourhood felt healing to me. I think of Isis and the difficulty of communicating with anyone because everything was so pretentious, including me, and I run emotionally! Do you remember? How we couldn’t even talk although we were neighbours?

Was it because I was or am more sick than the rest? What ever! Others can judge me because I’m not willing to.

Did you have an aim when you were inside? It felt as though I was always running behind something that got further and further away the more I was there. Then we leave and there’s apparently nothing. The things that people become identified with regularly don’t seem to attract me enough and the inner world that I would like to tread on depends on how I tread on this outer world. As you can see, I run and kick totally identified most of the time and give a dam about that too, it feels good to let myself be and know that it won’t kill me more than I died in the Fellowship.

And then I write to hear myself and others as if the words could give me back the knowledge of where the hell I left off or can get back on and what I can use of what happened in between.

If what you want is advice on how to dissipate anxiety, do little things carefully, slowly and be there for them. Give yourself the time to love them and take nothing for granted, specially the Sun!

The questions for me continue to be; how can I be more fully with the people around me? I was with my nephew yesterday, a five year old boy who needed my attention and I neglected him too concerned with the blog. I missed a precious opportunity and regret it highly. How can I invite those around me to feel the little life that is left vividly and gratefully without fear of dying?

“Like giant, cosmic chutes between the Earth and sun, magnetic portals open up every eight minutes or so to connect our planet with its host star. Once the portals open, loads of high-energy particles can travel the 93 million miles (150 million km) through the conduit during its brief opening, space scientists say.”

It made me wonder, given the idea of “as above, so below”, what the corresponding process is for us.

——–

“8Hz is the approximate border between the Alpha and Theta brainwave states. It is brainwave reading when one feels ‘compassionate love’ and is also the approximate frequency of the “Earth’s Heartbeat” (Schuman resonance).”

Jomo, #32 & 34, Nice posts.
I appreciate your ability to dialog with a great deal of informed intelligence and passionate heart.
*****
Daily Cardiac, your voice is softening, keep posting. This place here is not about hatred of individuals but rather, hatred of abuse and hatred of ignorance: hatred of sleep posing as enlightenment.

Bipolar disorder has two groups – those who ‘swing’ cyclically and those whose moods are determined by ‘events’. I am directing an exhibition of my Academy of Precious Metal Arts students’ work for next week and am getting pretty excited about how it is all going. I made the ‘common sense’ move of contacting the Crisis Resolution Team yesterday and today Dr Nelson came around to prescribe me Haloperidol (an extra anti-psychotic to guard against ‘uncontrollable highs’). Dr Nelson is brilliant – an insightful gold-alchemy Solar-Mercury and I trust her implicitly, when I cannot judge right action for myself. Sorry to be a bit indulgent with my problems. Thanks guys.
Nigel.

….”The survival was very hard: I just went thru the separation with my husband and was left with two little kids. I imagined that salary, rent, school for kids will all somehow be reasonably balanced, but to my surprise LC school cost $750 a month, rent $450 (if I am lucky) and salary – $350. It took me some time to be ready to send my kids to a public school and hope that “negative life people” will not traumatize them right away. Thinking about going off salary was scary too – to work in “life” in a foreign country! Plus the prediction demotivated any attempts to develop a career. The whole preparation to 1998, plus the fire was so frightening! People were buying generators and food, but the only thing I could afford in preparation was a tent I bought in Grocery Outlet. I spent a few nights there with my children to safe ourselves from the earthquake. Luckily it did not happen!….”
___________________________
Tatyana, thank you for sharing your story, I recognize some of the struggles; it must have been a shock to come to a place in the US where survival was made actually harder.
This was one of the absurdities I had to live with while in Renaissance/Apollo. It was a demeaning life in every way since it was pure struggle to just try to make ends meet and for a long time.

I personally was naive to put up with that kind of squalor for as long as I did. There are different levels of members in the FOF, almost casts, some occupy positions of privilege, some have assets from their family or their work in “life”, only the most naive like me were duped into thinking I could be on salary and raise a family in Renaissance. There was no help, no sound counseling, but a sort of a general agreement that it was fine to live a difficult life because that was the price of awakening. What an illusion!

But when I look back into my life I see there are many mistakes and dead ends, the FOF was one of these, and yet we had to live through all these experiences. Later on we can even say that despite all negativity associated with Burton and fof, everything that happened to us has been perhaps a stepping stone to be where we are now.
You are free, I am free and certainly in a better place. Things get better overtime.

28 Daily cardiac
….”A lot of people will go to the polls today thinking their vote will make the world a better place but that thought is a fantasy. The world will change, not due to any politician in particular, but simply because change happens.

But if everyone could take their own advise the world would be substantially made better. Sounds simple, but that will never happen.”
_______________________________________
Daily Cardiac,

You seem to be a strong pessimist in nature, you have lost faith in humanity, and in following your leader Robert Burton, you give very little thought to humanity. Who cares? In your words: “The world will change, not due to any politician in particular, but simply because change happens.”
You see how self centered is your line of thought? It actually stems from some kind of spiritual ignorance, that we as human beings are not connected, and there is no hope whatsoever to change for the better. This kind of attitude leads also to discount and ignore other people suffering and not taking responsibility not only for the people who may be less fortunate than us, but also for the Earth, a living entity, breathing and moving like you and I.
I am not speaking from a moralistic point of view here. But from the growing awareness that we are actually all connected, and that our thoughts and actions do count and reverberate through the world even with a person at the time.
But you have chosen an isolated vision; you think the awakening you are pursuing is the only way to come out from the madness of this world, because yes, madness exists: and your school of presence is such place where madness abounds…

I think that sometimes people are staying because of the difficulties and not despite them. The more one pays the more one values something. Like in the Gurdjieff’s story about a Transcaucasian Kurd who bought an expensive fruit without knowing that it was a hot pepper and ate it all since he paid a big price for it.
I once met a woman who just joined the Moscow center right after she escaped the war in Chechnya. We had tea at the teaching house kitchen with her and she told me some horrifying stories about the reality of life during the war. We celebrated her double luck (escaping the war and joining the school) and to my great surprise the very next morning she ran back to Chechnya.

1. Another Name – November 4, 2008
“Keep posting friends. Every week people/ students decide to leave and many questioning. Today one more ex- student…. Keep doing what you do and add joy and live life fully.”
——————–

58 Tatyana
“I think that sometimes people are staying because of the difficulties and not despite them. The more one pays the more one values something.”…
————–
true, but after a certain point, at least for me the difficulties became so chronic I felt I was eating spiders every day for a long time.
I remember someone quoting Ouspensky saying : we do not have to eat spiders all the time, or something like that.
I remember thinking of this while in OH, but also I was not seeing an alternative. Too many spiders where chocking me! : )

Well said. Yes, Robert has never really respected others – even his own students. Gradually his students take on his attitudes and lose their ability to respect others, particularly those that are not part of the FOF.

Robert once (I was there) spoke about how the “scholars” know so much less about ancient history than the FOF while he pointed out that the 6 poops on a cave drawing were the sequence. He consistently devalues ‘life’ (those outside of the FOF). This is partially what makes people afraid to leave.

It is easy to see the imperfections in people, but Robert’s attitudes are full of hopelessness unless you fully buy into his paradigm. He told my friend at a dinner, “You value life too much.” Only presence is worth valuing and the way he teaches it is somewhat selfish. It involves inward focus and devaluation of all else so as not to lose the state. It even involves devaluation of individual talents. This view takes away from the desire to give (except to Robert and the FOF) and the desire to develop talents and when taken seriously ultimately leads to depression and paranoia. Many students are unable to value life, paranoid that their own weaknesses and lower self will take over, and afraid that they won’t be able to “make it” in life, or that if they can ‘make it’ that this will be worthless. This kind of attitude is not what most of us wanted to develop when we joined.

Perhaps Robert’s approach makes some sense for those that are able to find a nice state where valuation and love are enhanced. I think many of us ultimately observed that this was not really happening, or if it did happen, it happened because of our own being and not because of any “teaching”.

I think the FOF would do better for itself if it could stop the harmful activities from Robert, encourage people to develop their talents, allow students to experiment with other ways, ultimately giving back what they learn, and encourage involvement in, and giving back to society. I left because all of these changes were impossible with the current structure. This was for me a strong indication of a broken society. For many of us, our best contribution to change was to leave.

tatyana,
welcome back to life and the land of the living! it’s good to have your voice here.

if you’re a recent ‘graduate’ of the FOF you may have negative thought-associations when it comes to the idea of ‘life’ — that’s only the result of another brainwashing tool used by the FOF to keep you in the chains that would bind you to the cult and keep you from living in freedom.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours.
Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels.
Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another’s danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.
j x

Tatyana thank you for your story.
You are now in an America where you can become who you
really are. Free from your Russian past, Free from the oppressive FOF,
Free to set forth to your future in his big beautiful country.

For you a poem from Walt Whitman:

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

But when I look back into my life I see there are many mistakes and dead ends, the FOF was one of these, and yet we had to live through all these experiences. Later on we can even say that despite all negativity associated with Burton and fof, everything that happened to us has been perhaps a stepping stone to be where we are now.
You are free, I am free and certainly in a better place. Things get better overtime.

Vermanent worth a celbration? Cheers to you and my addition for you and all of us and others.

Yes and when you/I see your/my “mistakes’ or things you/I would have done differently, I myself..grief, sit with it, give it a space in my life, forgive and keep going. And there is that “conscience” that seem to need to go through this process.

Is this what makes a difference between wholesome people and sociopaths?

Gotcha. Now please explain to me about that membership part…that somehow the only way to experience presence is you have to pay your dues to be in the cult of some Northern Californian Sex Guru? For how long?

“If you believe in struggle you create it anew each time you oppose. This is a really fundamental law of (human) existence. Acceptance, inclusion, and transformation are the way out, my friend.”

I have no problem with “Acceptance, Inclusion, and Transformation” It’s only that these three all require Opposition. How is Transformation possible without Opposition? Transformation = Change. Many circumstances don’t want change; so if we conclude change is necessary a struggle will ensue with, if nothing else, inertia. The kind of change that just happens often is not change for the best.

Did Obama not just engage in a 2 year struggle to become president elect?

How do we Accept our fate without a struggle? For instance the death of a loved one? Do we not struggle to Accept this?

Inclusion? “Neither preference nor denial.” Isn’t this Inclusion? Isn’t this struggle? Or do you not have likes and dislikes?

It seems you are going out of your way to disagree with me (RB/FoF).

If you take Struggle out of the human condition you may as well take Light out of Enlightenment.

When you wrote ~ “You seem to have ignored the most important part of the comment, that if everyone took their own advise the world would be a much better place. What is pessimistic about that?”
——

This is simply something I wish to share that might bring you closer to understanding where Veramente is coming from ~ And how do you feel about it; isn’t it odd that you too “ignored the most important part” of your own comment, where you wrote ~ “Sounds simple, but that will never happen.”

I believe that it’s the last sentence you wrote that gathered the strength for the storm to take place in numerous hearts here ‘on’ the blog.

The lifestyle I lived in the F.O.F. was also what I made it, i.e., what I added to the soup mix and not just the kettle; I learned that my painbody ‘loved’ to speak affirmatively about the impossible and impossibly about tomorrow, then when it was called to listen to consceince, it made quick defenses that breaking all the windows in the room with bricks made the place more airy, fresh and alive, leaving out the fact that the room was located on the fifteenth story of a twenty story building overlooking thousands of pedestrians.

WR – “Gotcha. Now please explain to me about that membership part…that somehow the only way to experience presence is you have to pay your dues to be in the cult of some Northern Californian Sex Guru? For how long?”

I wouldn’t be talking about presence, much less engaging it, without the FoF.

For how long? That’s not up to me; I gave my body and soul to Allah, so it’s up to Him. You don’t think the FoF falls under Allah’s domain? What was it you said about all directions pointing to Mecca?

Daily HeartAttack: ‘if everyone took their own advise the world would be a much better place.’

So, WHO does not take their own advice?

This is chiefly the reason that FoF/REB fail to perform what they say, that is, fail to be their words:

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree: such a hare is madness the youth, to skip o’er the meshes of good counsel the cripple.

The Merchant of Venice
Act 1, Scene 2
William Shakespeare

FoF/REB is a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ type of organization/person.
Don’t believe anyone that does not walk the talk. Truth be told, if you ain’t the words, then you ain’t. Wake up to that simple fact.

Daily HeartAttack: ‘If you take Struggle out of the human condition you may as well take Light out of Enlightenment.’

This statement implies that Enlightenment is a Struggle out of the human condition. Why does Enlightenment have to be a Struggle? That is an FoF/REB, The Way of Abuse, belief system. Wake up to that simple fact. The way to be in the Inner Circle of humanity is by wishing to Be There. And, I am not talking about the inner circle of REB sex cult (although wishing to be there may also produce results – like free membership in FoF, STD’s, etc.).

There has to be a reliable, neutral observer when talking about this ‘struggle’ and the division of lower and higher selves. It’s quite easy to start putting observations into the wrong category, or maybe the neutrality doesn’t go quite deep enough… so you’d need a lot of observations over a period of time to be reasonably certain.

It is impossible to start with the notion of lower and higher selves and try to shoe things in, willy-nilly. Sure you’ll change something, but that will trigger another reaction in another corner of the body, unbeknownst to you!…

So a more sensible place to start might be: ‘What is seeing this as lower/higher?’

There has to be a reliable, neutral observer when talking about this ’struggle’ and the division of lower and higher selves. It’s quite easy to start putting observations into the wrong category, or maybe the neutrality doesn’t go quite deep enough… so you’d need a lot of observations over a period of time to be reasonably certain.

It is impossible to start with the notion of lower and higher selves and try to shoe things in, willy-nilly. Sure you’ll change something, but that will trigger another reaction in another corner of the body, unbeknownst to you!…

So a more sensible place to start might be: ‘What is seeing this as lower/higher?’

——

The more sensible place is generated (and only in the present moment) when, by union with a larger Wholeness, what is real in our being steps out by surrendering the dual thinking of our limited mind which thinks (just rolls of course) itself to be a separate and quite unique entity.

This limited, illusorily separate mind spends its time generating ‘discussion’ on its own level with other minds of the same quality and basically turning around in circles on the same level. It can blindly go on forever.

This is true about minds on one and the other side of the fence, about the discussion between the two ‘sides’ and also about the vaste majority of minds that will never know about this fence, being busy with their own artificially self-constructed burden of fences.

When the petition is ready to be sent we could coordinate it with picketing in the embassies of the United States with signs for Mr. Obama:

“Mr. Obama please listen to the petition to investigate the Cult, “The Fellowship of Friends” in Oregon House, California, where children and old people were banned from participation, teenagers were sexually abused and adults were silenced.”

“Freedom of religion is not freedom to abuse”

“Spiritual life runs hand in hand with practical life”

“Constitutional rights must not be violated by Cults”

I’m still trying to find some of the ex-members so that they consider signing. Hopefully a few more signatures can be added.
When it’s ready I can take a bus to Bogota overnight and do my job there until the press takes notice of it. Then it’ll again be out of our hands for a second round.

——————

Time is love
not money

——————

Daily Cardiac,

It is wonderful that you are here. You are no longer in the Fellowship no matter how much you talk about it. What matters is not what we say but what we do and in being here you are already practicing things that you cannot practice in the Fellowship.

You legitimize the blog and the blog legitimizes you, not the Fellowship.

Many of the things you stand up for are truths in or out of the Fellowship but what you want simply does not happen in the Cult and you are realizing it so badly that you’re spending more time here than there. It is good to see the mildness of your posts now. Like Glob you’ll end up leaving and being grateful for having tried to save the Fellowship and saved only your self. The few inside that are not even willing to defend it anymore and just wait in the hope that it won’t crush know that they cannot defend it because they lost sincerity too long ago. Unless they know that you’re inside and already brainwashed they are not willing to risk themselves.

I wish you were Girard, but unfortunately he is one of the others.

Hopefully we can use your and Glob’s example to realize that just being here long enough changes people just like being in the Fellowship long enough does. In an atmosphere of participation your I surfaces in an atmosphere of prohibition your I, withers.

I have to admit that the concept of being able to struggle or work towards consciousness, was largely what attracted me to the 4th way and the FOF. I liked the idea of a system based on effort and reason. But I think now that the struggle for presence can and usually does become an obstacle and in the end can defeat presence, joy, and even conscience.

I believe it is our nature to struggle (some more than others). We have energy and we want to do something constructive with it. What can be more constructive than work on consciousness? This seems obvious perhaps but it becomes complex because of the nature of identification.

If our heart is working effectively, we turn that natural desire for struggle to something useful for ourselves and for others around us. This makes us happy and productive. Presence sits on top of the struggle, or lack of struggle, and watches it. It naturally results from living our life without judgment.

The struggle to be present often has the unfortunate effect of identification with the effort, identification with being special for trying to be present, and identification with a state when it comes. Large payments for presence only increase this identification. Going against our sense of right and wrong for presence furthers the need to be getting something for that payment. Dismissal of our family and long hours of 3rd line increase the identification even more.

When the desire for presence is fortified by payments, it is difficult not to identify with results. This identification is not presence and tends to obscure it. I believe now that it is very important to let go of the identification with presence, which means letting go of duty, fear of failure, a sense of right and wrong in relation to presence, and any idea that presence makes us a better person. It means letting presence come and go as it will. It means letting go of the duality of good and bad in relation to presence.

More lasting presence must be separate from the “doing” or from the struggle. It is simply the joy of being alive and knowing we are alive with no sense of struggle to be present. As I said before presence watches the struggle or lack thereof without judgment.

Ideally presence becomes a love and not a duty. When it becomes a duty identification with the struggle obscures presence. The sequence, counting clicks, and any attitude that smells of “I am more present than you” replaces presence with identification-with-struggle and presence becomes a duty, even an athletic contest. This attitude interferes not only with real presence but also with friendships, since the focus becomes inward (on me) instead of on the joy of friendship. We sometimes may judge others based on our assessment of how present they seem to be and we may judge ourselves if we cannot hold on.

Presence as a duty also can obscure the obvious (e.g. driving past our exit or being so present that we don’t notice another person’s need). Likewise, it can obscure the subtle emotions that can lead us to a joyful life. It can obscure our conscience and our personal and individual valuation based on our own individual perceptive devices. It can obscure our innate sense of what is useful and what is harmful, what is fair and what is unfair. It can obscure the alignment of our actions with our individual essence.

Real presence is effortless. It is not a struggle. It is the simply being alive and knowing it. As long as charged words like “lower self”, “devil”, “divine”, “paradise”, “double death”, “immortality” etc. are used to describe presence or lack thereof, we will get caught in the identification with the struggle. Charged words like these cause us to identify, to judge, to miss the simplicity of presence as it is, the simple joy of acceptance of all, the simple joy of knowing that we are alive in a very strange world.

One of the joys of leaving the Fellowship, the charged words and the huge payments, is the tremendous relief that comes with letting go of the identification with presence. The result is that presence can become a love and not a duty, an old friend that drops by, and drops by often knowing that he is loved.

If the thought of leaving the Fellowship produces fear, then this shows the level of identification with struggle and attachment to the concept of presence as a duty.

Daily Cardiac:
Thanks for your post. Please keep posting. Apparently you are one of the only ones left in the FOF with balls enough to post on the blog. I do think you are a brave soul with a stout heart to take such a hammering and still keep ticking. I pray you one day soon make the brave decision to liberate yourself from the cult.

“I gave my body and soul to Allah, so it’s up to Him.”

Make no mistake; you have given your body and soul to Burton and his cause as many have before you, and therefore not to Allah.

Since your spiritual ignorance is so thick, I’ll make it easy for you, step by step.

There is but one God, one Absolute. You worship a man masquerading as a God (or Goddess as he claims). I worship the connection with God within me. Allah has given each of us that same connection. Some have discovered this secret, some have not. For those who cultivate and honor that connection within them, there is a level playing field. Anything that attempts to pollute the individual connections we each have with God or divides us against ourselves is a force to be struggled against, and that is jihad.

Each of us are free to have our own connection with God; let no person convince you otherwise. Everything we need is provided, all the help, even the great injustices in the world against which we morally struggle, like the FOF.

“I wouldn’t be talking about presence, much less engaging it, without the FoF.”

Same here, only you are still supporting a cult run by an exploitive leader who is a sexual predator of his young male followers.

“You don’t think the FoF falls under Allah’s domain?”

Grasshopper, Allah is All and Everything.

“What was it you said about all directions pointing to Mecca?”

No. The meaning of the story is that although Mecca may lie to the East, Allah is everywhere. All directions point to God. The question really is: what is the direction of our worship? Is it a place on the map? Ground zero…perhaps? Is it a person? Is it a thing ?

“Everything is better with presence; sex, food, drink, eye contact, sunsets, anything you can think of – even suffering.”

I pray you have the wisdom to know the difference between necessary and unnecessary suffering.

You speak of presence as a drug and a commodity, “just sprinkle a little of our brand of presence on it to make it better”…yet rest assured, the FOF doesn’t hold the patent on being present or staying present as the case may be. Show me the love not the money.

If everything is more enjoyable with presence, then please explain to me why you claim the “demon self” wants nothing to do with presence?…seems like a double bind, if you ask me…the kind that keep people in cults.

“Words are flowing out like
endless rain into a paper cup
The slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy
are drifiting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me

Images of broken light which
dance before me like a million eyes
That call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the universe

Thank you. Yes, this “duty” reminds me of me… Growing up: the sensation-field of ‘duty’ came from a deep fear of being alone, of no longer being a family member, or being abandoned by? Mortality? Abandonment itself abandoning Life through Death that begets Life? Then there’s semantics too… I beleive I understand your version of duty.

So much to rearrange and learn anew, past The Book, and into the authors biographies… These days I do not see ‘the struggle’ as below presence or presence sitting on top of it: could it be simply implied in the song of presence itself?

Maybe it’s not struggle in the sense of a goal or looking for something to result (as) some form of payment or reward/trophy for the painful or ‘present-minded’ self to get, which, once gotten, ironically depicts its own enemies attributes of fleeting-ness and time-limits… I feel that it could be as simple as not doing anything that depresses the body or calls on my consceince to hide; to be looking over one’s own shoulder to see if god is watching is indeed a dark place, one we all have some relationship to (yes?)

The painful self (painbody) is one side of the same coin I believe, because there’s the equally competitive side called ‘I am happy because I know you’re wrong’ or ‘I am happy because I escaped suffering longer once again’. Still, the coin depends on both sides of itself to say ‘I am flippable.’ Then there’s the third side of the coin, its edge, its round, roll-able edge where nothing ever falls off so to make a sound or an alarm, it simply hosts walking and walking till the treading wears the coin down to a sphere that the journeyman can pick up and call home, a planet, a star, a lover or an all seeing eye.

The Fates have nothing on us and what they cut (when they cut), IMO, belongs to their own growing hair; that we’re caught up in it is immaterial really… We’re on Earth no doubt and loving one another successfully; having a ‘duty’ to love (as I’ve experienced it) hides an underlying hypocrisy of great proportions: though it seems that this ‘important’ sense of ‘duty’, the urgency to be an urgent person (like an urgent series of labor pains), comes before what is essentially one’s own conscious autonomy-version of love ‘As-Is’ right now…

And it’s something we have to pillage through and remark about, over and over again, until we realize that it’s our hands that are looking who are searching for those lost gloves called ‘I’ and ‘Am’…

Then there’s the soft snowball fight and burning tires late at night, the collective breath-atmosphere of a billion children running, wild, free of freedom and free of ‘thought’, something we’ve inherited by a human incarnation, that I myself do not recall signing, though do feel, that, if I did, then it was most likely me…

I want to meet the swan someday who provided that ink quill to me, filled with its own dark red fluid show; we’ve got allot to not say to one another about everything.

Well said about presence. Effort introduces desire, and desire is by its nature tainted with selfishness. In fourth way language, effort makes presence into A influence.

Robert used to talk about creating memory. But I have never connected presence with memory. In fact, something in us, the observer, remembers every moment of our life, whether we were trying to be present or not. You can verify this by looking at your dreams, where perfectly detailed memories from decades past can appear flawlessly. Neurological research has found these memories stored in different parts of the brain. No effort required to form them.

93. unoanimo
“Maybe it’s not struggle in the sense of a goal or looking for something to result (as) some form of payment or reward/trophy for the painful or ‘present-minded’ self to get, which, once gotten, ironically depicts its own enemies attributes of fleeting-ness and time-limits… I feel that it could be as simple as not doing anything that depresses the body or calls on my consceince to hide; to be looking over one’s own shoulder to see if god is watching is indeed a dark place, one we all have some relationship to (yes?) ”

YES…. And thank you for that paragraph. There are words there I needed and can hopefully make use of today.

CT – “What Ellen was trying to tell you was that you’re too hung up on the idea of struggle – ‘identified’ in your language – to pass beyond it…

If you believe you can ‘become the higher self’, just as your master RB does, you have no chance of coming to the point where you can pass on from the opposites.”

Maybe you didn’t understand the point I was making, or you just ignored it as often happens with several ex members. But “passing on from the opposites” was/is the point of my remarks.

We go beyond the opposites, resolve the opposites, through struggle. It’s the only way I know.

CT, you are taking up Ellen’s non-dualist mantra of – Everyone is eternally present and they always were and always will be.There is nothing to try, nothing to become. You are already there. There are no obstacles to presence, just what your mind invents. Don’t invest energy in the idea of there being obstacles and you will see they will disappear.

Maybe this is also your mantra. I shouldn’t suggest you are championing Ellen’s beliefs as they may also be yours.

So, if everyone is eternally present and always have been then everyone’s enlightened. And if everyone is enlightened then no one is enlightened as it takes darkness for there to be light. Light ensues from darkness and darkness overtakes light. Light can only be measured, debated, analyzed, if there is also darkness. I see a lot of darkness in the world; just pick up a newspaper and browse through it, look at CNN for an hour.

According to non-dualists there is no actual struggle. The way I see it everything is a struggle, in the real sense of the term.

We struggle to be born, we struggle to live and we struggle in some form until our last breath. We also struggle to be present, to be conscious.

If you are in a cold room and you want to light a fire it’s a struggle. Someone struggled to chop the wood (if not you someone else.) You or someone else struggled (labored in a job) to buy the wood. You struggle to light the fire. You cannot light it from your comfortable chair. You have to get up and retrieve the wood, arrange it in the fireplace.

Non-dualists might say you feel cold because you invest energy in being cold; stop investing the energy and you won’t be cold.Then you won’t even need the fire.That might actually work for some people to some degree.

It does not change the outside temperature however. If it’s cold enough you will freeze to death, your blood will become like ice, whether you invest energy in the process or not.

To CT – I don’t know that we ever “become the higher self.” I do know that we can struggle to remove the obstacles that prevent us from realizing the higher self.

It seems like the word struggle has struck a tender cord on the blog. It reminds me a little of when I let slip the word Verification.

Ah… your examples of struggle are illuminating, DC. I like to light fires! It is no labor to me. Unless, of course I have the flu or something – maybe you have a sort of spiritual flu? Similarly, working is normally no struggle for me, it brings satisfaction to my day. Labor, struggle, these are words of duty, not joy.

In relation to the Shore of your silence, it was not for you but for All of you, with great love!

I agree with you Daily Cardiac, there’s struggle, but in the Fellowship members struggle to disappear and become a mass of like minded individuals supporting Robert’s abuses.

Glad you’re so enjoying expressing your freedom to speak.

I don’t think Ellen or Crouching Tiger are as formatory as you make them sound, they are way beyond what you’re willing to acknowledge. What I’ve heard them say is that the elephant is already there and the sculptor simply lets it be but although that was hammered and hammered in the Fellowship you’re the only one still struggling to understand it so that you can justify brainwashing people with the Fellowship’s harmful efforts.

P.D.
There’s also a great difference between struggling and working but you have to believe that there is a need to struggle because you’ve lost the pleasure of working like any simple decent human being.

You sound pretty decent in your last post though and enjoying yourself a great deal so keep struggling!

We need at least four more hundred signatures for the petition to be good enough!! If each of the a hundred get four more signatures it’ll be done! If we “did it” why don’t we do it?
Then I might not have to stand and ask for Mr. Obama to look at it!

42 Tatyana
….”The survival was very hard”
57 veramente
“It was a demeaning life in every way since it was pure struggle to just try to make ends meet and for a long time.”

RB’s obsessions are sex,money,possessions and power. Has anybody
ever seen him deny himself any of these?
Isn’t it strange that his ‘consciously’ applied shocks never involve him;
~ Cooking dinner for students (I imagine that would be a HUGE shock).
~ Working shoulder to shoulder with a student in the vineyard or winery.
~ Taking less money for himself for one month and giving everyone on salary a bonus.
I could go on….
Why do his ‘shocks’ for students not involve any inconvenience to himself (not even once…). Things like this would really create states for his students (especially after 30+ years of the status quo), yet will never happen. Why is that hmmm?

DC: When you have the flu there is a struggle going on inside your body.
Armies of good germs are at war with armies of bad germs

There is struggle everywhere but I think the real question is not about this but rather whether or not the attitude of struggle promotes being present.

Some struggle is required at the right moments, but life is not all struggles. If we over-struggle, or struggle in the wrong way or in the wrong places, or more importantly, if life feels like an unending fight, then this may not be a very good life.

More good is done under the name of joy than under the name of struggle. Joy and struggle can coexist but too much struggle defeats joy.

We do not have enough energy to maintain presence when it is forced, just like a singer cannot maintain a long note when it is forced. The right balance must be found so that the note perpetuates itself with only the slightest guidance. Likewise in springboard diving, it is necessary to have the appearance of tightness. Chinese divers are famous for their straight legs and pointed toes. But to the diver, the tightness must not feel tight. The diver must be relaxed with tightness only in a few required places, otherwise he cannot manage the awareness, quick movements and exact timing required to complete the dive. The diver must learn how it feels to struggle in some areas and be relaxed and responsive in others. His training involves learning to differentiate.

A great note when sung correctly sounds easy. A great dive looks easy and to the diver, a great dive feels easy, because for the most part, the diver is relaxed during the process. Lasting presence feels effortless and feeds on joy to keep it going.

The attitudes that feed presence are usually not about struggle but rather about letting go of judgment. Consider “Things as they are, Myself as I am” or the non-dualist concept that we are always present. These attitudes are about giving up struggle, judgment and identification and may bring more real presence than click counting or trying to Hold.

But the average person on the street can neither dive nor sing. They need some talent, a good teacher, and years of practice. They need to perform exercises, under the direction of the teacher to add strength, flexibility, finesse and awareness.

Did we have a good teacher? I’ll let the rest of the blog debate whether or not Robert teaches effectively. My main point is that generally activities like presence that require finesse have points of struggle and points where it is essential to NOT struggle or let go, and experts must learn when struggle is appropriate and when it is not and which struggles are rewarding.

Is letting go a struggle? If it is viewed this way then most likely the effort will be ineffective. It reminds me of trying to dance in high school.

“To CT – I don’t know that we ever “become the higher self.” I do know that we can struggle to remove the obstacles that prevent us from realizing the higher self.

It seems like the word struggle has struck a tender cord on the blog. It reminds me a little of when I let slip the word Verification.”

No, I’m not a ‘non-dualist’ although I can see the value of the principles non-dualism in realizing the nature of, and finally exiting from, the fellowship.

I also have no problem with the sense of struggle. But the greatest and fiercest struggle of which I’m aware is the struggle to become still. To be in the centre of a great silence. It’s a paradox.

Your first paragraph feels like the core issue here. “I don’t know that we ever “become the higher self.”” – this sounds like a reluctant admission on your part. The tone of your previous posts implied that you felt you COULD become the ‘higher self’ or whatever you imagine that to be, and somehow discard the lower self like some sort of dead skin (as at death, in RB’s universe)…

“I do know that we can struggle to remove the obstacles that prevent us from realizing the higher self.” – Broadly yes, but I still feel here a ‘preference’ for the higher self. What we can do, moment-by-moment, is to realize, more and more accurately, the relationship between the ‘higher and lower selves’. That is where consciousness lives, that is what is given to us as the appropriate action. It sounds like a small difference in words, but the difference in reality, in internal activity, is huge.

I believe this is where you and I part company (on this issue) because you harbour a sneaking preference for the higher self and believe you will shed the lower somehow, and thus ‘live eternally’. I am still outgrowing, and have outgrown this belief.

It sounds like you want to caricature both Ellen’s and my position, to make it appear that we reject the notion of struggle completely and so are unable to ‘work’. This is all in your mind.

All internal work is about ‘HOW’ – how to learn, how to apply your energies, how to understand, how to struggle…. etc. There are some missing tools in RB’s esoteric box, and others that are misused, so that the struggle of which you speak has assumed ever more bizarre forms – ample testimony to that here and elsewhere. Because the form is bizarre, the results are bizarre.

Re-reading Old Fish’s post (111) would be of benefit. If there is a small mistake made at the start of any venture – say, like building a house – your struggles may well become herioc in size simply because that first foundation stone was laid slightly askew! Efforts may look even bigger than they properly need to be because your always trying desperately to prevent a leaning tower from falling over.

It’s the struggle of compensating a fundamental imbalance that you’re mistaking for the struggle for whole-ness and wholesomeness.

DC 107
We were already aware that you have some problems with biology. Once again please watch out for fuzzy thinking and inaccuracies. When one has the flu the struggle is not good germs against bad germs. It’s the immune sistem’s white blood cells fighting against viruses (or bacteria).

It seems to me that you are engaging in this discussion about presence and struggle from a very intellectual standpoint and that your present view of nonduality is uninformed, narrow and formatory. I would like to share this video I watched last night on GF which possibly may help to raise the debate to a more productive experiential level. What do you think of this man’s firsthand realizations?

You have shown me great favour. I mean that. And I thank you for it. Your posts are becoming fuller and fuller and more responsive.

I’m sorry if my words of #14 created confusion for you. Others here seemed to get the point (thanks Golb, Crouching Tiger, Elena, Whale Rider and Old Fish all for your fine posts). So, I’ll try to say it a little differently now.

Struggle, the term and the experience, as I understand it, takes into account only two polarities. Polarities that you described so well in some earlier post as pairs of opposites. However, the world within us and without us is fully based upon triads. That is also one way to understand the essential message of the Fourth Way and all esoteric teachings. Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, Father-Son-Holy Ghost, Being-Consciousness-Bliss, etc…

The point in any “struggle” is where you place your identity – and that is one way to see the hidden third element (in this case we can call it mind-identification). In a sense, if you reinforce the reality of the lower self by believing in the necessity of struggling against it, you are simultaneously creating it, too. It’s a strange and mysterious dance.

Try this example: take out a clean piece of paper and place it in front of you. Examine its characteristics, white, clean, pure, with a certain texture, etc… Now take a pencil (or pen) and draw a thick clear line down the middle. What has happened? Suddenly there are two sides, left and right. Is the paper still there? Have any of its essential characteristics changed? What has changed? And where do you choose to place the emphasis as you take in the impression? If you want, you can write bad on one side and good on the other. But do those values exist intrinsically now on the paper or in the mind? In other words, have any of the essential characteristics of the paper itself really changed? Even further, could left and right exist if the paper was not there?

To my perception, you have a deep underlying belief that the essential nature of man is “evil” and in need of strenuous control. You superimpose this belief upon all your sensory impressions. So, it is what you see and no one can refute that. It’s like always seeing only one half of a piece of paper. In contrast, non-duality simply says that there is a piece of paper there, pure and white in its original nature: realize it to be so, and your imaginary divisions fall away. Left and right have relative but not absolute reality.

You can feel the small illusorily separate mind of a wealth and wordly successful boy trying to maintain an inner world that doesn’t change (which is impossible). And in this case trying to influence billions of other same minds…..apparently successfully.

Student: I don’t think it is working. Several years have passed and I dont seem to be getting anywhere.

Teacher: Be present with me for a moment. Yes, good. The world is much larger than the two of us. It is a joy to be alive and it feels good to work with you. We are both simple people. Let’s wash these dishes together. Watch ourselves washing the dishes.

Student: I feel a state Robert.

Teacher: Good but let your state go. Let it come and go as it will. Gently watch as we wash. Your state is not good or bad. Just watch. Watching is being alive. Notice that watching takes almost no energy. It is easy. Keep watching and washng. Let the sounds of the water and the reflection of the soap bubbles come into you and feed you as we wash. There is joy in those bubbles. It is enough to be alive. There is no way to be wrong. We are alive together. Let your thoughts bubble up. They are part of the joy. Watch them go by. They are part of life. Everything is part of life. You are part of life. We are here now to wash dishes so lets do it well.

Student: You left a spot on this dish.

Teacher: Yes. We can help each other. Can you fix that spot for me, while I start the next dish? Presence keeps on moving – each moment brings new life, new opportunities. How is this dish?

Student: It is clean.

Teacher: Yes, and you are also very clean. Your tension is gone. I feel your happiness. How is your writing?

Student: I have not had time for writing lately.

Teacher. You have a talent for writing. Try to write as we have washed dishes. Let your mind go. Watch where it wanders. Hold presense but with the least amount of energy, so that you can be responsive to your thoughts. Writing will feed your presence like the bubbles fed us when we washed. Do not identify with your state good or bad. Let your mind wander. Keep a long and loose leash, but watch so that you can write what your mind produces. Reduce the tension and do not judge yourself. You are sensitive. Try to write every day. Let the writing flow and feed your happiness. Let’s meet again in a month to see how you are doing. Prepare a paragragh for me on being present while writing. I want to read it and look foward to our next meeting.

SCENE 2:
Student: I don’t think it is working. Several years have passed and I dont seem to be getting anywhere.

Teacher: You are dong fine dear. Continue doing the sequence and spend more time here at the Galleria. Dorian, lets leave tomorrow instead of Friday.

Some students cannot allow themselves to look at Robert Burton critically and question his position of a conscious teacher. They project on him an image of a holy man, because they want so much to have a holy man in their lives. The need to have a spiritual leader is so big that no evidence of him being a serial rapist, criminal or ruthless liar and manipulator will be enough to see him for who he is.

Women have the same mechanism. When it is brought to her attention that her husband is a child molester, a woman would not believe and defend her own child. She will blame her child for false accusations and lying. There is a law which protects children by taking them away from a mother if she takes a side of her partner.

What would it take to stop projecting and finding excuses for Robert and accept a rude awakening?

Let’s say that they ‘do’ know all those things are real about the teacher (as a little voice in all of us knew at some point in time) and that the projection was/is actually towards ‘that picture’ and not the holy man; what would this imply?

For me, the finalizing of the departure process away from the F.O.F. occurred the evening that I realized ‘it’ (the contradiction) supported my own existence-hypocrisies within and that no matter how much I struggled (which was not the issue BTW), the heart & gut proximity to where those efforts were directed was ‘All and Everything’…

The struggle really isn’t the issue is it? ‘Proximity to what’ is everything: if I wish to support the feeling within me of closeness to whatever it is that created this incredible coat my soul wears, then I do not mow the lawn belonging to an old WWII mine field or weed whip around a honey bee apiary…

It’s pretty simple once you connect the dots, that A through Y are all Z’s dreams.

Daily Challenge:
“There are no obstacles to presence, just what your mind invents.”

If everything is more enjoyable with presence, then please explain to me why you claim the “demon self” wants nothing to do with presence?…seems like a double bind, if you ask me…the kind that keep people in cults.

BTW, the “lower demonic self” idea is in fact an invention of the mind, too…a literary device. Truly, for you, the totalitarian regime of the FOF, Inc. is the obstacle to your spiritual freedom.

>>>>>>><<<<<<<

“When you have the flu there is a struggle going on inside your body.
Armies of good germs are at war with armies of bad germs.”

From Wikipedia:
“A virus (from the Latin virus meaning toxin or poison ) is a sub-microscopic infectious agent that is unable to grow or reproduce outside a host cell. Viruses infect all cellular life.”

In plain terms, the virus in not a “germ” or a microorganism at all, nor does it reproduce itself by cell division as most all other organic life does. It clones itself by exploiting the resources of the host cell. So there is debate in scientific communities whether the virus classifies as biological organism at all, hence the definition, “a sub-microscopic infectious agent.”

You might think of viruses as nature’s inbred way of thinning the herd so the strong survive.

Since viruses infect all cellular life, it is our immune systems, not “good germs” which have the task of dealing with viruses and keeping them in check. Viruses tend to replicate more when our immune systems are weak and are spread in many ways. Disease-bearing organisms are known as vectors.

BTW, the idea of “good germs” makes you seem uneducated as the definition of germs usually implies a pathogen. There are certainly helpful bacteria in the world and in our digestive tracts who might take offense to being called a “good Nazi.”

I do like your flu analogy in general, though; and if we were to explore it a bit, there are some here who might argue that Burton is like a virus, and the FOF is the sickened host cell in which he must live in order to survive. That host cell is swimming around the body of humanity. And to reproduce he must clone himself. (That’s kinda scary.)

I guess that makes you a vector. And you remain infected due to that very same “evil” you speak of…“FD”…the “conforming principle.”

Once our bodies are exposed to a new or virulent virus, the race is on for the body to create enough antibodies to deal with the virus before it spreads, as some viruses are deadly. While our white blood cells surround and isolate the virus (like the ‘pig pile’ game we played as kids), the body makes antibodies that find the virus’ weakness and disables it. (Ever get the feeling, DC, that your viewpoints are being smothered by all these posts to you and about you….?)

So the real struggle for each of us here is to stay healthy enough with a strong immune system in order to keep in check the processes inherent within us and in the world that would divide us against ourselves.

Dear Old Fish in the Sea:
Scene 3 would be one in which you put the dishes into the dishwasher and take off with the Shaman who guides you on a journey into yourself for some personal work on your long body in the Fourth Dimension of Time…and to hook up with your power animal and inner guide.

Old Fish, thanks for another fine post. And thanks tatyana, please keep posting.

This should have been a little side note on the subject of presence, effort and impressions, but it turned into more of a rambling rant.

One of the many ways in which the Fellowship dogma pretends to be pursuing presence while in fact doing everything possible to complicate the process, is the whole “fine impressions octave”.

The very narrow, very subjective and unreal definition and delimitation of the concept of fine impressions in this cult’s mentality has been meticulously cultivated by Burton from the start. Baroque music is a fine impression, ethnic or “popular” music isn’t. Renaissance art yes, modern art no. Bonsais and rose gardens, yes, wild animals and vegetable gardens, no. Ballet yes, jazz dance no. Shakespeare yes, Samuel Beckett no. And the list never ends,…

But the whole delusion goes much deeper than that. Think about all the money we spent purchasing beautiful precious gifts for the noble ark, and the way everyone has been subtly manipulated into believing that Robert’s expensive lifestyle is a sign of spirital superiority. And strangely enough, the whole aesthetic pursued by the Conscious School of C Influence strictly follows the very peculiar, unimaginative and objectionable taste of a provincial gay American middle-aged guy.

One could rightfully say: if Robert is so advanced, why does he still need so many fine impressions, especially in the form of handsome young men, to surround him all the time? At this point the steadiness of his state is surely independent of surrounding elements… right? How long has he been walking on the wildside and dancing with the stars?

But people are too busy to ponder such highly esoteric matters.
They are busy making efforts or feeling guilty for not making them. They are busy working their asses off to make teaching payments. They are busy trying to be in goodhouseholder – keep the house clean, you shouldn’t read your Shakespeare until the room is in perfect order, don’t leave the pot in the sink, it’s a si-do interval! They are busy orgaizing lovely events an endlessly beautyfying the property, just waiting for the next order to tear it dons again. They are busy endlessly repeating ideas they don’t really understand anymore. And oh, the slight feeling of guilt everytime one indulges in some simple pleasure, in an enjoyable activity with no features of enhanced refinement and evident contribution towards the noble effort of Being Present. And asking questions is definitely another of those time wasting activities we never want to indulge in…

So people can keep working on peeling the price stickers off their shampoo bottle and think that they’ve made an effort by raising the level of the shower impression octave (from a memorable angle of Gui-e-e-e, unending source of many joyous laughs throughout the years). But I am sorry to say, folks, that kind of effort ain’t ever going to cut the mustard. Awakening is not about completing octaves, is not about having a pretty house with well kept lawns and carefully ironed shirts. And as long as you believe it, Burton’s grand scheme still holds you in its hypnotic power.

In fact, Robert has managed to kidnap a group of children of the sixties and seventies and to mold them into the soul-shackled serfs of an incredibly unjust, segregated, hypocritical society that thrives on a very special brand of superficial refinement and hidden perversion, mandatory beauty and widespread poverty, superiority acts and inferiority complexes, misogynist discrimination and homosexual glorification, cultural stagnation and esoteric pretense.

Not bad for an Arkansas schoolteacher. I guess one could say that yes, he can.

121 In fact, Robert has managed to kidnap a group of children of the sixties and seventies and to mold them into the soul-shackled serfs of an incredibly unjust, segregated, hypocritical society that thrives on a very special brand of superficial refinement and hidden perversion, mandatory beauty and widespread poverty, superiority acts and inferiority complexes, misogynist discrimination and homosexual glorification, cultural stagnation and esoteric pretense.

Laura, I am overwhelmed. I remember you well and am amazed that a non-native English speaker can master English so well. Impressive.

And yes, I was too busy to question much. It was so much easier to keep working, justifying it all, and trying to be present so I wouldn’t have to see or act. When I became sad I just worked harder. More and more I retreated into work becuase it was safe and it felt productive. From there I did not have to deal with my own questons. But all that work almost wore me out and my essence was not well. Thankfully, there were some very happy moments and I did manage to learn a few things and meet many nice people out of a similar mold, and I did pass through an awful lot of naivite.

Would I be further had I not met the Fellowship? I cannot answer that. I guess I would have more retirement. Do I have a single regret related to leaving? No.

Congratulations! Your application to engage in endless struggle (sometimes called “the-wild-goose-chase”) has been approved. Please disregard any human emotions (good or bad) that you experience. They are only temporary, I assure you.

– I don’t want to be a business owner. Business owner means work 24 hours a day 7 days a week!
– And this is how people are losing the school!
– Yes!
– In life I could be a multi-milliner, I know how, I understand how it works.
– This is what so and so said about Robert – if he was not a conscious teacher, he would be a multi-milliner in life.
– My lower self is angry, because it hates C influence for the fact that after all the efforts it made it did not get any results.
– This is what we are paying for.
– Lower self is very logical, it tells things like – what are you going to do when you are old! Who is going to take care of you! Who is going to pay bills!
– It is amazing that we have C Influence. Without C Influence the School would not make any sense!

Struggle only makes sense for a time – the period when one is moving away from False Personality (lessening its influence) and strengthening (developing, as the FOF says) Essence. When the final blow (nut theory) arrives that takes away False Personality, then Essence exists for itself and then there is only enriching experience – broadening and deepening. I would suggest that those who stay in the FOF continue to experience False Personality (in terms of the ‘form’, which may have no relationship to one’s Real Essence) and hence struggle is continuous. Thanks to Mick Danger (124).
…..Nigel

“There is s struggle everywhere but I think the real question is not about this but rather whether or not the attitude of struggle promotes being present.

Some struggle is required at the right moments, but life is not all struggles. If we over-struggle, or struggle in the wrong way or in the wrong places, or more importantly, if life feels like an unending fight, then this may not be a very good life.”

I agree with you completely.

“Man was made for Joy and Woe, and when this he rightly knows through the world he safely goes.” WB.

Contrary to what some have suggested I am not identified with “struggle” but I do recognize it’s place in acheiving spiritual results.

Of course, like with all endeavors, large or small, there can be wrong efforts (struggles) or untimely ones.

And as you said, presence can at times be “effortless” and this is indeed the best kind. But even this “effortless” kind is based on past efforts, on a foundation.

“Not bad for an Arkansas schoolteacher. I guess one could say that yes, he can.”

From how and where and with whom the FoF began almost 40 years ago to where it is now – Impossible for an Arkansas schoolteacher, but child’s play for gods.

“Awakening is not about completing octaves, is not about having a pretty house with well kept lawns and carefully ironed shirts. And as long as you believe it, Burton’s grand scheme still holds you in its hypnotic power.”

If you believe that’s what we believe, or why we stay I can see why there is so much resentment.

DC – talking to you is like talking to a Jehovah’s Witness – your perspective is all faith-based. “child’s play for gods”? How trite – and how on earth could you know?

I have the distinct feeling that you stay because your faith makes you feel secure. That you cannot stand the idea that all your “work” might have been based on lies, flashy gold paint, empty promises of “the celestial city of paradise”, and regular (or occasional) doses of the drug of hypnotic group “presence”. And that all of your debate on this site has been to try to bolster your own faith. It takes courage to leave the cocoon of sureness, courage to say honestly “I don’t actually know what the hell is going on or what my life is for.”

… presence can at times be “effortless” and this is indeed the best kind. But even this “effortless” kind is based on past efforts, on a foundation.

Brother, I understand you believe this to be true. Beliefs can be examined, you know! I want you to examine this belief.

The belief that all your efforts cumulate into presence is a linchpin. What would you do without it?! What would you believe without it? How would you act without it? What would you justify without it?

How about a little thought experiment. Try setting this belief aside. Set it aside for a day. Every time you spot it zipping across your cerebral cortex, say to yourself: “I believe that. But is it really true?” Allow yourself to experience doubt. I know, lower self, blah blah blah. But try it anyway. Report back any sincere observations here.

It’s disheartening to hear DC continue speaking about suffering which I do assume is the ‘romantic’ stuff of the Fellowship, while knowing that what awaits him is very probably some true suffering for which he will have few pretty words. I admire all of those who continue engaging him, circling around the form he understands. The strength of their compassion glows beneath the words.

I really hate (tongue in cheek) to point out such minuscule and absurd things.

Yet:

116. Old Fish in the Sea – November 7, 2008:

‘Teacher: You are dong fine dear.’

Must have been intentional, on Old Fish in the Sea’s behalf, and/or a Freudian slip: Teacher constantly mindful of the male students’ genitalia. As in:
dong³ Definition: dong (dôŋ); noun, Slang, Vulgar [for] the penis.
Funny, all that was left out was the ‘i’ – third eye, that is.

Your posts are very beautiful and thought provoking, but this whole “presence” thing seems to me very self-limiting. I think you points lead to what I understand from my FOF and beyond experiences. The exercise is just that, an exercise one of many that can enlighten. It seems to have become an end unto itself, the goal that falls short.

So why do I think “being present” is self limiting as an experience? It’s because it draws the focus of consciousness into our personal locality with our selves at the center. This, and even part of the dish washing story, sounds like auto-hypnosis. And it is. (The sequence is clearly a degenerate form of the exercise, and is blatantly auto-hypnotic.)

I see consciousness (or a “higher states”) as an expansion of awareness, inclusive of our body and the miraculous complexity of our many thoughts, but not as the center, and not limited to the local. That suggests other exercises of conscious states where one is being present outside our own locality, say, somewhere else on the planet. Surely, a man 7.3 (!?) would have no trouble demonstrating this and teaching it. Doing this an irrefutable way is far beyond any of the simple parlor tricks of Robert and those like him.

D.C.
Do you realize that you are at the very end of your life right this very moment? Your whole life has been lived right up until now, and it is your life’s “sequence” in it’s entirety, that determines how you experience “presence”. What have you been doing with you life, and what are you doing with it now?

These are not conventions/inventions of the FoF. These are not “inspired improvisations.” These are “warring pairs”, expressions of the natural law of opposition. The universe is built upon opposition.

There is opposition, there is struggle, there is a conquest of one over another. There can be no higher self but one that rises over the lower self. There can be no beauty without ugliness. The lower self will not escape a wormy grave. It has no motivation to make spiritual efforts. None whatsoever. It thinks there is nothing in the world higher than itself. It doesn’t play fair; doesn’t give the higher self it’s due. It will take Caesar’s share and the Lord’s share if left in charge.”
in #127 you say“Contrary to what some have suggested I am not identified with “struggle” but I do recognize it’s place in acheiving spiritual results.”

Though your two posts may seem contradictory, I’m not interested in challenging their flaws. You have a profound recognition of duality (the polarity of opposites), but how in your mind does that relate to triads? Levels of different energy that accept, transcend and include each other? Like the Fellowship’s including ‘life”, “former students” and the “lower self”?

I’m also interested in your comment “acheiving spiritual results”. “Who” achieves “what”? DC, the protagonist, realizes his true nature as white paper? Is that what you mean? DC may get a momentary glimpse of light through the cracks and like a tethered donkey keep chasing that carrot in front of his nose, but isn’t the white paper always there? Or am I missing something?

DC128
“Not bad for an Arkansas schoolteacher. I guess one could say that yes, he can.”

“From how and where and with whom the FoF began almost 40 years ago to where it is now – Impossible for an Arkansas schoolteacher, but child’s play for gods.”

Following your way of (un)reasoning I suppose we could say the same of the odd Austrian high school dropout who became Germany’s Fuhrer and amongst other things caused the death of six million Jews.
How could HE have gone so far without the gods’ help?

Once again, please watch out for fuzzy thinking and try to utilize some scale and relativity. We don’t need to disturb the gods to explain the whys and hows of Burton’s accomplishments. This blog has already done a lot to shed light on the very mundane causes of these seemingly (to you) arcane matters.

“Awakening is not about completing octaves, is not about having a pretty house with well kept lawns and carefully ironed shirts. And as long as you believe it, Burton’s grand scheme still holds you in its hypnotic power.”

“If you believe that’s what we believe, or why we stay I can see why there is so much resentment.”

No, you still cannot see why there is so much resentment, believe me. And I don’t believe that the obsession with formal matters is “why you stay”, I think it’s just one of the toxic ingredients of the brainwash detergent. And it’s not one viral aspect that should be underestimated, in fact it’s at the root of the false personality of the cult, as pointed out by Nigel. I still find traces of it in my belief system, in the form of judgemental attitudes and exaggerated formal concerns.
Do you think you are free from it? Just try to live like a slob or a slacker for a while, and verify if it comes easily. After many years in the cult, this sort of experiment will likely be a real form of struggle against your ingrained learned habits and established self image.

Paulshabram around 137;
Regarding the ‘old fish’ and all the recent ‘talk’ here about ‘presence’ I agree with you Paul, after following the posts of the past week or so and all this ‘lip service’ being given to the notion of ‘presence,’ I was beginning to feel like I was back in the cult…. this talk and emphasis on ‘presence’ strikes me as an ‘after-shock’ of the the brainwash and indicates it’s still in effect. That some folks want to hold onto, or for reasons other than choice, are unable and cannot let go of ‘the system’ and the years of experience and brainwashing in the cult — these after-effects are understandable (given the circumstances). But If you hadn’t pointed it out in a more diplomatic way already, I was logging onto the site today thinking I would post something to ‘old fish’ –gently, if sarcastically suggesting that he could start his own cult… afterall, it seems he already has a nucleus of admirers here on the blog. I think this idea of ‘presence’ can be misconstrued, used, and misused as a means of auto-hypnosis — as you pointed out. And as you indicated (and I agree), there is a lot more to ‘the picture’ than simple ‘presence’ and repetition of the mantra.

“No, no, no,” we only know how to say no because we can’t hear or pronounce “yes.”

There’s a race in which the runners take the tag from the runner before them and move forward with it but we’re still running against each other convinced we are going to win.

I guess we did take up the idea of the club and you’ve got your club by fact beyond all those words of friendship. Friendships that send a formal invitation and never say a word again, like Robert’s receptions, killing the intent before it spreads.

Paul, Ton, “yes” and yet is it enough to say no? Or is it invalid to say I in certain circumstances and not we, remaining local? We don’t allow each other to say we but also protest when we say I?

Am I such an expert at it that should not speak now?

Old Fish speaks gently for those who can hear it gently but he’s being so deeply sincere, what keeps you from hearing that and not disempowering him with the new cult theory?

Since I’m doing the same in the next scale above or below as you wish, who am I to say?

We struggle as long as we need it? And start affirming when we unify?

In all your no, you are affirming beautifully Old Fish, please continue to lead locally if we can at least get to the street beyond.

Paul and Ton, it is nevertheless good to hear the reach of your voice.

–––––––––––

Since you ignore everything else, why don’t you ignore this too. It was with ignoring the obvious that Robert was made king, like Dark Card who’s become the aim of your prayers. Talk about the golden calf!

‘That’s one fine dong, dear’
‘But Bobby, you say that to all the boys.’

A little explanation for one who claims to know:

“Lust is the lowest, most distorted form of love. Greed, too, has little in common with love. Greed is possessive in all its gross and subtle forms. It covets and appropriates coarse objects and people, as well as such ephemeral things as money, power, and fame. Love seeks and attracts things and person of beauty, and values of lasting significance. The very idea of exclusive possession is unthinkable in love.”

Thank you for pointing out the limitations of my post with respect to presence. Many of my efforts in the past were misguidingly aimed at creating this trance like state which we used to call presence. Even worse, we used this trance like state to buffer seeing the obvious. It allowed us to smooth over conscience and to totally disregard the little inner voices that rightfully help us to choose a more useful path.

The intent of that post on the two teaching styles was more to point out that the first style cared, became involved and encouraged developing talents. Essentially the first teacher tried to teach. My experience with Robert was that in this sense he did not teach and that the appearance was that he did not really care. It reminds me of another story of a student that had been active at Renaissance/Apollo/Isis for 18 years and Robert thought that student was a new student.The fact that the first teacher sounded hypnotic was because I do not have the being to be a teacher and therefore the being to show how one would teach. I do think a teacher would care enough to follow up and encourage, but exactly what he would teach is beyond me. I teach diving and know something about that. I know nothing special about teaching life.

There does seem to be something to the concept of consciousness ( or am I just holding on to an old, old idea). At least I can say that there are times when I am more perceptive, loving, constructive and alive than other times.

Any thoughts on avoiding the trap of the trance, guru, and hypnotic comfort zone, while still seeking to heighten life? How would a real teacher teach (if such a thing exists)?

Elena: Thank you for encouraging me to continue and I hope this helps us to get to that street beyond.

Anyone who knows Old Fish recognizes that he certainly has no aspirations of being a guru. He is, however, a kind and caring friend to anyone who spends time with him. Most people post here for personal healing and to help others if they can. Namaste

Elena, some of your recent posts seem to indicate that you are experiencing feelings of isolation and emotional discomfort. Although it’s not clear to me if you are addressing anyone here in particular, is there any way I (we) can help?

wulswu 150
I agree. I haven’t seen Old Fish for a while, but judging from his recent writings he still comes across as the very gentle and caring person I used to know and appreciate.
Trying to make sense of and integrate new ideas while holding on to whatever still feels useful of the old stuff, like all of us have done and for the most part still working at it…

The subject matter of this blogsite seems to be ‘all over the place’ at the present time. Anything probably planetary? I will be 52 (not bad going for a mostly-Solar) on 24 November and would hope that there would be some ‘solid direction’ for a few days prior and after. That would really make the celebration special…..Nigel.

The message I would get across to all who are thnking of joning the fellowship of friends or people who are in is the fellsowhip of friendsis to give them information/ education waht a cult is and how to recognize a cult.
The fellowship is a cult and robert Burton is not a conscious being. Robert Burton is sick and has a distorted conscience. DISTORTED

If any student or prospective “student”, person want to joint he fellowship and get soiled with the sex, money and fear/ power game, based on being well informed…..

Times are changing, we are all family now, and are there more then one schools?

The beatles and Jazz is hip on the property and Robert is arranging a big vegetable garden for the need of his students?

Cult life is wonderful…..

Strangely enough, people are still leaving the wonderfull fellowship of friends…this week 5 people that I know. Blog, petition, writings of old fish, picketing….your writing, talk to your friends, keep going friends …

Old Fish,
I meant no criticism, but a critique. D.C. is clearly a (one or more) shill(s) for the FOF. It’s (his/her) message is not to us ex-FOFers. It speaks to the current members peppering the dialogue with loaded terms and dogmatic reminders. Sometimes the posts come out of nowhere and read like FOF-speak sermons equivalent to “fire and brimstone”. If D.C. is doing this intentionally or unintentionally it still has an same effect. After more than 29 years out I find my self reacting to these posts. Some of it’s word have a tinkle of truth, but much of it rings (bongs) false.

I am hoping you keep posting, I enjoy your posts as much as Elena’s. I enjoy C.T.’s posts as well. I respectfully suggest that the when you fall into a dialog using what we used to call “work language”, that you pick your way very carefully. Much of Burtonism and the “Fourth Way” are based on false or totally unsupported assumptions. Even in Ouspesnky’s writings and lectures the assumptions are layered and layered, finally turning back on themselves into a circularity that crashes the whole thing. Using this language runs the risk of doing the D.C. cohort’s work for them.

We all found the FOF because we were searching or exploring. Systems like the 4th Way, like biological entities, evolve under the same type of pressure for selection. The pressure, however, we supply by the search itself. The bias we bring to the search has us finding what we are searching for. Not because it is necessarily really there, but by disregarding what is not consistent with what we imagine we are searching for. Eventually, we see only what supports our suppositions. Our own embarrassing support of the “C-Influence” through synchronicity is a prime example. Ouspensky’s, Gurdjieff’s, and FOF’s admonishment for “verifications” come by constructing them from pseudo-scientific sounding “Laws” and layered axioms, the root of which, have no basis.

I have experienced unusual states coincident with different stimuli. Self remembering is one of them. I have experienced things I cannot readily explain with science, but that does not mean they are not causally linked to biology. The premise is that these are “higher” states. Who sez? Well I say they are not “higher”, just altered to look like what we imagine is “higher”. Are there “higher” states?

First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, verse 11)

When I was a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away
childish things. For now we see through a
glass, darkly; but then face to face: now
I know in part; but then shall I know even
as also I am known.
jx

The sensation of doubt seems to have all sorts of play things; it’s so quick to choose the news about terror that has already happened, than to be held steady by the love in the chest; churning, flowing love, holding the held breath who’s breathing in the brain only, only for the god of an idea of an inhale to permittedly arrive some day… Though, isn’t this how we grow, just, sorta like that?

Then there’s the anxiety, the restlessness of that ancient heirloom called ‘Good & Evil’; psychic habits, so old, that when we adopt their children, their emotions have become ‘dolls’, not commonsense sensations or ‘talk to me’ episodes with consceince… It feels to me, these days, that truth is getting desperate about credit cards and rainchecks issued underwater…

A scene ~

There’s a young and old poet sitting at two separate windows in the same house. On a cold winter night, they’re both experiencing The Doubt, the yearning for some ‘love-pause’ in this cyclic thoroughfare called ‘I am’.

The young poet exhales deep upon the window pane and begins to draw a picture, adding some descriptive phrases from time to time so to dredge the canals of weeping so to go deeper and to just find some-thing…

Slowly the steam disappears, requiring the young poet to take in another deep breath and exhale so to see where he last left off, each time pausing his breath to draw more detailed details and to get as much as possible in each small pane.

The old poet lifts the window and exhales deep and begins that older than himself habit belonging to him of drawing on the air as it passes by, a new, continuous pane each time…

Through the thin, oriental walls of this house comes crashing Rumi & Shams riding a really pissed off pair of untamed unicorns… Woooo! High Low and away! Crashing through the wall between the two windows, they keep riding, trampling trees, mountains and planets in their way…

—

Sure there’s the war wounded walking around in us (the lower?) and newborn infants scratching their backs on warm, stationary cannon wheels (the higher?): though inside love, don’t we have it all as our own, one complimenting the other, the nurse needing the hospital, the hospital needing the bricklayer? Or could the ‘right & wrong’ incarnation simply be a metaphor for the soul’s first sign of cell division into two so to be born as… Or does that word ‘born’ even fit the soul? Like trying to squeeze a too too on a tyrannosaurus rex?

Is there a path offered by the ‘school’ for DC to reconcile this left and right brain habitat of emotions we’ve all inherited as human beings, as our daily consciousness is automatically ‘divided’ (seemingly) on opposing fields? Then there’s love, moving into the middle, of the middle and from the middle: where are the applications of love? I ‘thought’ allot when I met the F.O.F. for the first time, second, third, etc.

Lovers ~ So many years of watching tennis: maybe you’ll start writing secret love notes on the tennis balls of your opponents and make pacts to aim at the net; so much that it eventually falls away in shreds, and then you can meet in the middle, where there is no middle. You’ve built a tennis court on top of Love’s planet, and on top of your solo game?

All this ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ is very embarrassing for the blushing consceince-story belonging to the hour glass’s real waistline story; because if it weren’t for that portion of sand that didn’t need to become clear glass, then…

I saw and appreciated your post but did not think it needed adding to. It seemed fine. With respect to the inner teacher, I am taking your question to have no inner, deeper meaning. I think in the end that is all we have and if nothing else comes from our experiences of being in and eventually leaving the Fellowship, I hope that we can all come to trust ourselves more and be less willing to give up our life to anyone that pretends or seems to know more than we do.

158. paulshabram
Well said Paul. I appreciate the dialog. I use work language because it is the only language that we share as a means to talk about some of these issues which remain important to many of us. But you are right, the language colors our views and carries us (me) back into the FOFway view – the one many of us are trying to go beyond. You believe that what we call higher states are just altered states. I do to, or at least I am very suspicious of higher states as they were taught in the FOF, and though I spent many years pursuing states both before and during my FOF days, I will never again be willing to bet my life on higher states as presented by any guru.

I think it might be more interesting to value our state less and how we function more. Functioning is not based on hypnosis or trance. It is what we do, how we treat people, how we live and what we value. Values need to be personal, not based on any group think, but based on evaluating our experiences as objectively as we can with our intellect and our intuitions. Whereas states are largely about getting rid of all judgment, functioning is about fine tuning our judgment – essentially creating good judgment.

“…In other schools of Buddhism, awakening or bohdi seems remote and almost superhuman, something to be reached only after many lives of patient effort. But in Zen there is always the feeling that awakening is something quite natural, something startlingly obvious, which may occur at any moment.”

“”The Lankavatara Sutra states that there are both gradual and sudden ways of awakening, the former by purification of the tainted outflows or projections (ashrava) of the mind, and the latter by paravritti – an instantaneous “turning about” within the depths of consciousness whereby dualistic views are cast off.”

“No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
No cultivation, no intention;
Let it settle itself.”

This sudden awakening is characterized more by letting go than by fighting.

Your ostracism ought not surprise me, after all, I seem to have hurt more than one sensibility with my posts. I thought we had understood something when we fought but we have obviously not and are going to keep the old pattern that we were coming with or worse. After almost two years it should be easy to get used to it again.

You’re too smart to need help to help. What do you want me to say? Yes dear thank you, would you send me a blank check to your heart account? Love Robert?
“In what language can you hear people pray”? Or beg? I obviously don’t know that language and at this point am not willing to learn it. When things get to this point one better stand aside and move on. Where pretense and formalism becomes the rule and the silent agreement to ostracize who you cannot legitimately ban prevails, the society has rotten and it is no longer worth belonging to it.

You win. I give up. You and all those who you so courageously represented, for it was just that.

That doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing. It simply means I’m clear about where I stand when I write. I’ll stop writing when silence feels better than words and hopefully that will happen soon enough.

I will say in my favor that I came with love and was attacked, defended myself and hurt but have never hurt anyone who did not try to hurt me first. If I’ve exposed things that have fallen on people’s lives it has been with the aim of exposing those acts and behaviors that hurt us in the Fellowship or that made the Fellowship possible, not anyone in particular. Here in general, people seem rather upset because I defended myself equally or more powerfully than those who attacked me. You want people on their knees before you let them be, like Robert in the Fellowship. If you challenge people and can’t reduce them you opt to ignore them. Ostracism is one of the saddest and lowest of human behaviors. You can talk of love and unity and everything honorable but like Daily Cardiac, as long as you’re not willing to acknowledge someone amongst you, you’re in your own made up world, blinding yourself to a whole side of your being.

In this case it is I who Daily Cardiac has chosen to ignore and the lot of you want to follow him, of course, you were already good at it before him. Of course it is painful to talk about this but I have not silenced myself before fighting for others to participate in their own right to avoid assuming mine to expose the decadence of your souls. You expect me to feel shame and not talk about this but the pain I feel is not confused with shame, the shame I feel is not for me.

Isn’t it beautiful how it works? Even at my cost it is beautiful to observe: the community legitimizes who ever it is willing to dialogue with and destroys who ever it ostracizes. That is how powerful it is. What matters is the acts, not the words. Every individual that is left out because of money or class, education or nationality is reduced proportionally in his sense of him or herself which many, many overcome in time. The limitations of a society are the limitations of its being in time. The struggle of the individual from those limitations frees him or her and the generations to come.

Your ostracism does not belittle me as much as it reveals your own condition. You are people who, if you cannot win an honorable battle one in one, you’ll get together and ostracize the individual. We learnt too much in the Fellowship: We learnt to kill people emotionally.

It’s true that under those circumstances there is little motivation to be here but I do not promise to leave as so many of you seem to wish. I seem to recover so quickly and not give a dam if I hurt and feel like I have something still to share but this time you won, be sure of that, this time you won if that is what you people call winning.

As for those formal invitations for friendship when the heart is not willing to rise to the situation, they are not necessary: formalism is all we had in the Fellowship and another of the reasons I left. What peace it gives those of you who make such empty gestures, God knows, but they don’t reach me no matter the package.

Take good care of your selves. There is gratitude for the opportunity to learn about the human soul.

This is not addressed to all of you, there are always exceptions to the rule and to those exceptions, thank you.

Old Fish, it is not difficult to stand up for someone who is doing his best.

Your ostracism ought not surprise me, after all, I seem to have hurt more than one sensibility with my posts. I thought we had understood something when we fought but we have obviously not and are going to keep the old pattern that we were coming with or worse. After almost two years it should be easy to get used to it again.
—————————————–
honestly Elena, I think you are misreading Laura’s post.
She is a good friend.

I agree with veramente. I think you are reading something into Laura’s question. I almost asked a similar question, in that I thought I had missed something and was going to ask who it was you were posting to. Her question to you sounded like a simple and innocent query as to your wellbeing.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I am pretty sure that almost all that post here, even those who may have at times been critical of things you have said, or disagree with you, do sincerely care about you.
You do know that, right?

Perhaps it will help you to think of the blog as you thought of Dorothy. Dorothy needed help and love and sometimes she returned it and you were appreciative. I was not there but I guess there must have been many times when she could not appreciate what you did for her. Even so, you consistently gave her love and helped her even when you were ill. In fact you gave your health to help her even until the day she died. I hope you will think of the blog this way and continue giving even if we (the blog) are not always aware enough to respond.

The blog can be a cold place. Even the most appreciated posts fade into oblivion within a few hours. And few of us want to take the time it takes to read every post carefully. There are many misunderstandings and there are many interesting posts that receive no comments just because they were good enough as they were. Whereas Dorothy may have been worth it, the blog, as interesting as it is, may not be.

Last week you were quite happy and loving and some commented that you seemed to be doing well in Columbia. This week is darker for you. The darkness will pass and when it does, you will see that no-one has ostracized you and that we all are welcoming you back from your journey.

My point-of-view is this: having been a member of a 4th Way group with some connection to Gurdjieff’s actual teaching for some time now, I can try to point out where Robert Burton’s version is so very different… In fact, I don’t feel it makes any sense to call the fellowship a 4th Way school at all, unless using Ouspensky’s terminology is enough by itself!

The starting point in G.s teaching is cultivating an ability to talk to the ‘horse’ (body) in its own language, and a balancing of centres that allows each to function with the energy that belongs to it. Normal man before any possibility of Superman.

This seems to me far more sensible than anything I experienced in the Fellowship, where these attirbutes are noticeably lacking… But as you say, it’s always good to have reminders not to get too wrapped up in terminology.

Elena.

I re-read Laura’s post and don’t feel any attempt to ostracize you here. It’s just that sometimes people respond to posts, sometimes they don’t, and none of us has any control over that! Best to write it and then forget it…

I would certainly number myself as one of those in your ‘support-system’ here.

Seems to be much posting about the actual form of the FOF and the validity of ‘higher states’. Coupled with this, the fact that REB may not teach real ‘higher states’ – only the nicety of experience, to coin one of my own terms. There was alway a sense, in the FOF, of “how nice we are all evolving together” and “how things will be special in the ark”. From my own experiences, higher states are not some fluffy, necessarily positive things that happen, but often drastic, crisis-ridden experiences, where one is forced ‘upon the ‘Promontory of Selfhood’. I remember dinners with REB – perhaps the only occasions when I was with him for any length of time – where the whole situation seemed ‘set up’ – all finery and intentionality – guaranteed to bring about a positive state. That to me is HYPNOSIS. And the whole form of the FOF supports this hynosis. Beware, any still inside, who are blinded by this…..Nigel.

“We all found the FOF because we were searching or exploring. Systems like the 4th Way, like biological entities, evolve under the same type of pressure for selection. The pressure, however, we supply by the search itself. The bias we bring to the search has us finding what we are searching for. Not because it is necessarily really there, but by disregarding what is not consistent with what we imagine we are searching for. Eventually, we see only what supports our suppositions. Our own embarrassing support of the “C-Influence” through synchronicity is a prime example. Ouspensky’s, Gurdjieff’s, and FOF’s admonishment for “verifications” come by constructing them from pseudo-scientific sounding “Laws” and layered axioms, the root of which, have no basis.

I have experienced unusual states coincident with different stimuli. Self remembering is one of them. I have experienced things I cannot readily explain with science, but that does not mean they are not causally linked to biology. The premise is that these are “higher” states. Who sez? Well I say they are not “higher”, just altered to look like what we imagine is “higher”. Are there “higher” states?”

Your link seems like a reasonable summary, in general terms. Gurdjieff obviously showed a lot of adjustment to his audience and their expectations. ‘In search of the Miraculous’ especially is clearly targeted at a certain audience.

I guess fragmentation of the teaching after G.’s death was also inevitable.

However I do get a sense that you are trying to judge more authentic versions of the teaching (branched from Mdme. de Salzmann) via what you learned in the FoF – which presumably is the only version you actually experienced?!

So there’s a very tight limit on what you would know about the mode of teaching and what is being taught, right?

I am collecting informations and I offer everything to all of us.
If a discussion or yet a brain wave about these links or sentences becomes into being it will be perhaps a clarification/information for some people who were concerned/involved or who are visitors or something else it doesn’t matter.

Yes fragmentation was inevitable and this link is another summary in general terms.

I am interested in the positive evolution of our abilities to overcome negative emotions with the aid of philosophy and “religions” or the deep interests of mankind in conciousness raising are in my opinions technics which try to overcome these negative emotions.

But all paths might be heading for desaster if the intention became clouded of e.g. hate/animosity/envy…. and all the subtle shades of negative emotions.

But first of all I try to relax. I am nothing but a human being on his way through this life.

Gurdjieff and all his teachings written and handed down through the years are in some cases and for some human beings techniques with a “sadistic” touch and they didn’t evoke spiritual awareness of the “machines” but often the subtle application of a dark equipment.

169 Old Fish in the Sea
The blog can be a cold place. Even the most appreciated posts fade into oblivion within a few hours. And few of us want to take the time it takes to read every post carefully. There are many misunderstandings and there are many interesting posts that receive no comments just because they were good enough as they were

171 Crouching Tiger
It’s just that sometimes people respond to posts, sometimes they don’t, and none of us has any control over that! Best to write it and then forget it

————–
Thank you both for saying the above.The blog can feel cold at times, because we cannot always connect, respond or even pay close attention to what everyone writes. Better not take anything too personally.

“Traffic at a red light. The lights change, the cars move off, all except one that remains blocking the middle lane.

A man inside is shouting the same three words again and again: ”I am blind.”
Distraught, he is accompanied to his home by a kindly stranger.

But this GOOD SAMARITAN is also a CAR THIEF. Having taken the blind man home, he steals his car.

A short time later he too is blind.
What is this malady?

The FIRST BLIND MAN consults an ophthalmologist. He tells him the blindness is NOT DARK but a BRILLIANT, impenetrable WHITE. The doctor examines the man’s eyes, but there are no lesions, NO SIGNS of DISEASE.

In his apartment that night the puzzled doctor sits up late with his medical textbooks. The case is baffling. He shrugs, returns the books to the shelves. The last thing he sees is the back of his own hands against the spines of the books.

The first blind man, the thief, the doctor. Later come the girl with dark glasses, the boy with the squint, the old man. Nobody has a name in ”Blindness,”

José Saramago’s symphonic new novel. Indeed, there are no proper names of any kind.

The city in which this catastrophic epidemic of blindness breaks out is never identified. There are no street names. This is any city at almost any point in the modern era. This is everybody’s disaster.

The government takes measures to halt the contagion, now known as the white evil. Those who are already blind and those who have been in contact with them are rounded up and driven to a disused mental asylum at the edge of the city.

Among the first internees are the doctor and his wife. The wife has lied in order to stay with her husband. She too, she claims, has the white blindness, though in fact she is the only one to retain her sight. Why she is spared is not explained.

Clearly it is useful for Saramago to have at least one pair of eyes still seeing, but as both readers and characters begin to suspect that the BLINDNESS has as much to do with a PATHOLOGY of CONSCIOUSNESS as with any failure of retina or lens, we are invited to speculate on her exclusion, as indeed we are invited, sometimes teasingly, to speculate on every aspect of this fascinating novel….”

But what is the blindness?
What does it stand for? The characters, of course, must put the question a little differently. What is the nature of their affliction, the cause of their blindness?

In the last pages of the book, as the white blindness finally abates, the doctor’s wife, whose eyes have borne all the burden of witnessing what the others in their sightlessness were spared, offers us a kind of answer:

”Why did we become blind, I don’t know, perhaps one day we’ll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.” …..”

In my opinion this might be ELENA’S view of the attitude concerning some BLOGGERS/READERS at present. The multitude of the words and the absent-mindedness concerning the petition and the signatures.

“Gurdjieff and all his teachings written and handed down through the years are in some cases and for some human beings techniques with a “sadistic” touch and they didn’t evoke spiritual awareness of the “machines” but often the subtle application of a dark equipment.

All philosophies of self-development or religions do seem peculiarly open to perversion – ‘narrow is the way and straight the gate’. For every individual, a great deal of courage is needed to set out on a path, which as we’ve seen with the fellowship can be fraught with danger…

And yet, I guess all of us here preferred at some point the setting out, the pioneering effort of self-discovery to being “one of those cold and timid souls that know neither victory or defeat”. The waving good bye to familiar shores in favour of an ocean of which we knew nothing. You can’t live in fear of failure or take anything too seriously.

A friend of mine who knew Gurdjieff told me a story of a dinner in which G. dismissed a student who was speaking too much: “You… talking machine. You always talk too much. Leave now”. The student left. Ten minutes later, G. looked up and said, “Where talking machine? He need to be here now.” The student returned, none the worse for the bruising.

I’ve often experienced times that felt tough or worse, like this. But the students of G’s and Mdme de Salzmann I’ve met, all mention the great warmth and empathy around them, alongside the unyielding edge, the ruggedness.

What about you? Beyond the collector of information, where did you set out? You must be the only one on this Blog who wasn’t in the Fof… so it would be interesting to hear your story?

Please explain more your idea; with an understanding (I hope) that the blog actually was the first ‘Petition with signatures’ of its kind that prompted ‘All and Everything’, including Junior Petition 2… The blog is alive and breathing; the petition is its ongoing body-tattoo; its cool, though its not the Harley that’s carrying it to the convention, if you know what I mean…

Catch 22ish in that there’s a symbiotic relationship going on and IMO, it’s not a contradictory one… Just different in its proximity and context to people’s personal lives, which I have to trust is not my personal life, otherwise I would be advocating a positive cult mentality, no?

Thank you both for saying the above.The blog can feel cold at times, because we cannot always connect, respond or even pay close attention to what everyone writes. Better not take anything too
personally.

———————
and on the very plus side this blog is also flourishing with compassion…

This is a first post of someone who spent years of her life trying to understand and make sense of the non-sense that has been offered in the FOF. Will not go into the details of my journey at this post.

Thank you all who sincerely tried to communicate what you saw and perceived about the cult named “the school”, about a clearly damaged and dangerous man named “the teacher” and about having the courage to take your lives in your own hands and trying to heal and learn to love and enjoy again!

Special thanks to people like DC! Your posts – contrary to your possible intention of informing people who are in search of some kind of truth that this Fellowship of Friends is the place to experience higher states- have really propelled me to pack my bags and leave town! And I am not the only one, there are more to follow…

The distorted way of looking at oneself and the gift of life has scared me, mainly because I saw that I was adopting it as well. The division between right and wrong, lower and higher, and a third state morality versus the morality of the sleeping man, is the most dangerous idea to experiment with.

Dear friends, the ones who are still struggling with your conscience, please listen to your own heart. Do not suppress your gut feelings. Try to listen what that voice tells you. Do not put every doubt aside labeling it “the many I’s that stand on the way, that do not allow me to do that next sequence.” You are the lover and the beloved and you are the one who knows more than anyone else your own soul, your own sweet self.

I just thought that REB takes personal merit for all the piffling, petty, ‘positive’ things that happen in the FOF, but does not feel responsible for all the major, negative aspects. I remember a quote from a pub beer-mat – “A true leader dances to the the music, even though, at times, he may not like the tune”…..Nigel.

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

(Song of the Open Road)

He puts things in their attitudes,
He puts to-day out of himself with plasticity and love,
He places his own times, reminiscences, parents, brothers and sisters, associations, employment, politics, so that the rest never shame them afterwards, nor assume to command them.

He is the Answerer,
What can be answer’d he answers, and what cannot be answer’d he shows how it cannot be answer’d.
A man is a summons and challenge,
(It is vain to skulk – do you hear that mocking and laughter? Do you hear the ironical echoes?)

(Song of the Answerer)

Whoever he looks at in the traveler’s coffee-house claims him,

(Song of the Answerer)

The earth does not argue,
Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,
Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,
Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out,
Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out.

The earth does not exhibit itself nor refuse to exhibit itself, possesses still underneath,
Underneath the ostensible sounds, the august chorus of heroes, the wail of slaves,
Persuasions of lovers, curses, gasps of the dying, laughter of young people,accents of bargainers,
Underneath these possessing words that never fail.

(Song of the Rolling Earth)

Give me the pay I have served for,
Give me to sing the songs of the great Idea, take all the rest,
I have loved the earth, sun, animals, I have despised riches,
I have given alms to everyone that ask’d, stood up for the stupid and crazy, devoted my income and labor to others,
Hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence toward the people, taken my hat off to nothing known or unknown,
Gone freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young, and with the mothers of families,
Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by trees, stars, rivers,
Dismiss’d whatever insulted my own soul or defiled my body,
Claim’d nothing to myself which I have not carefully claim’d for others on the same terms,

Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

(To the Rose upon the Rood of Time)

What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

To those who love a drama and in the absence of one, love nothing more than to create it…. it really comes down to perceptions and interpretations, right? That, along with intention, is what needs to be checked and re-checked, before hitting the ‘send button.’

I just want to take a minute to clarify some of the statements I left further up the page in reference to some of the things ‘old fish’ was posting. (By the way, thanks for your ‘presence’ here ‘old fish’ I really mean that sincerely). After posting my comments, several of the ‘old fish’ fans and supporters rallied to defend him, vouching for his character, insisting that he’s a ‘gentle soul’ etc, etc. I don’t doubt the veracity of these statements but this ‘defense’ missed the point of my post; which was intended to indicate the tendency to myopically focus on one idea, or ‘tool,’ or aspect of what used to be referred to as ‘the work.’ The particular form of myopia I questioned was the notion of ‘presence’ — I was not denying the importance or place of ‘presence’ — my intention was, and is now, to indicate that over-focus on this particular ‘tool’, to the exclusion of the ‘big picture,’ (imo) leads to an unbalanced sort of narcissistic self-absorption through a fascination with one’s own functions and perceptions. As a form of ‘auto-hypnosis’ this method is used and mis-used quite effectively as another tool in the FOF arsenal for mind-control.

My remarks about ‘old fish’ ‘starting his own cult’ and reference to the fan-base he’s attracted here on the blog, were prefaced (by me) with an indication that it was intended as sarcasm…. in other words the remark was ‘tongue-in-cheek’ — it was not an ad hominem attack, it was meant to make a point about what I felt to be an over-emphasis on a particular concept and what that can lead to when you’re able to convince others of the importance of a concept. One way to convince others is through repetition and over-focus. This unbalanced approach is something we’ve seen before with certain forms of cult-speak, cult-think and the behaviors it engenders. I have nothing against ‘the old fish’… I’m sure he is a fine and well intentioned individual, and just to be clear with him and all of his fans, I was not attacking the individual, it was the idea, the mentality and the effects of what was being expressing that I had an issue with.

Speaking of which —
CT in 171 you make reference to: “…Normal man before any possibility of Superman….” I’ll assume you are a ‘normal man’ which raises a question: as a ‘superman,’ what would you do with your new-found ‘super powers’ ? (I hope you’ll notice the tinge of sarcasm here again…. that’s intended as a form of humor. of course if I have to explain it, the punch-line loses it’s effectiveness. But it seems like some explanation of the joke is necessary at times since a lot of the folks posting and reading here are still so serious, self-important and defensive. I think that’s in some cases also an after-effect of the brainwashing ? Restoring the sense for humor, imo, is part of being or becoming a ‘normal’ human being). All of that aside, I think the question of what you would do with your ‘super powers’ is a legitimate question, if you have these sorts of aspirations….? What is it that fuels these sorts of ideas and aspirations ? I wonder if these sorts of polarities (e.g. ‘normal man’ vs ‘super man’) and the unexamined assumptions which ‘the system’ is rife with, are all part of an appeal to the mythologizing, ‘archetypal’ layers of the human psyche? (I’m re-reading Joseph Campbell’s – Hero With a Thousand Faces).

PS, uno & CT; thanks for your recent questions to this ‘dragon’ I’ve been wondering about it too.

The issue here is not only me personally but the fact that I represent a position in relation to the Fellowship, one that wishes it seriously and definitely closed. In not responding to the suggestions on the petition that I presented some time ago or anything else for that matter, that position has been disempowered and so have I. If that is the aim of many of you here that is fine, you are being very successful, congratulations. It is good to know it and to move on because while I am very happy to see Daily Cardiac being legitimized by the blog, the acceptance of that middle ground that the Fellowship is betting on to continue to exist is not what I’m interested in.

While I much enjoy being here and playing with our mutual differences, trying to expand on my personal understandings and particularly verify that the relationship of the community to the individual and viceversa determines both our personal and our social lives, I am mostly interested in actions that may bring the Fellowship to a closure.

After your response to my picketing I am naive in expecting your support in any further direction, in fact I am extremely naive in expecting your support what so ever. We disagree about fundamental things. I am naive enough to have thought that we had moved an inch but I acknowledge my mistake.

The acceptance of a middle ground in which we sit and dialogue with all the Daily Cardiacs while the Fellowship continues to function does not interest me. While it pleases me enormously that they soften and become more human, it displeases me that the Fellowship members get comfortable in your acceptance of their status quo.

I consistently make the assertion of mixing your rejection of my actions against the Fellowship for your rejection of me personally. I know that in fact they are one because we do not incarnate ideas for the simple joy of playing with them, we incarnate them because we are willing to live by them and in doing so they separate us. We do not agree to disagree, we mine the emotional life of those we disagree with no matter for what reason because they are not in harmony with our selves and that is obviously our condition in this forum, with or without drama even if you’d like to undermine that with labels.

It is good to know this because I won’t waste your or my time trying to insist on something that you’ve clearly settled for.

When there is no dialogue, there is no dialogue and it is not about the blog being cold or the people being too dramatic or other such excuses, the fact is there is no one willing to dialogue in those areas and therefor I am clearly out of place.

If some of you almost had a stroke when I went picketing in front of the Fellowship what kind of heart attack might you get if I picket in front of the embassies around the world?

Thanks Dragon for seeing, one is enough to know that I am not that off. You are a very fine Dragon so I will trust you to blow your sweet fragrance and inspire the kindness you deserve.

Laura, I apologize for directing that post to you, it was to all the blog. You simply asked the question and like it happened previously, became the medium and target of the many forces at play. May our many differences continue to help us evolve.

“DC – talking to you is like talking to a Jehovah’s Witness – your perspective is all faith-based. “child’s play for gods”? How trite – and how on earth could you know?”

On the way to verifying Influence C one naturally comes to see what is in their power and what is not – everything is in their power, is child’s play for them.

The one thing not in their power, or in their interest to control is forcing anyone to be present; as the whole value of it is in the yearning, the striving, the arriving at presence by way of a free will.

So that’s how I know. If you dispute that things like this can be known is that not a self indictment to the fact that you or other ex members cannot know what you routinely claim to know? Or do you get a corner of the market on truth simply by leaving the FoF?

For instance I often wonder how ex members can know what they claim to know about me; I’m often told my words can’t be based on truth even though I usually speak exclusively about my own experiences, which no one on the blog has privy to one way or the other.

Although while technically you did ask “how on earth would you know?” your tone strongly suggests you don’t believe I can know such things. Yet you seem to know all about my “faith based” perspective.

But I understand what’s going on. The ex members on the blog have an entirely one sided view of the FoF and any comments that fall outside of that one sided viewpoint simply don’t register to them.

It comes down to either taking the comments of someone like me at face value, and considering the possibility that their own viewpoint may not represent an all inclusive knowledge, or holding to their present views and branding everything outside of that a lie or a delusion.

I also understand that the stakes are high for many here. For many ex members their own vindication is at stake. Many won’t rest easy as long as the FoF is in existence. And if their contribution to bringing it down lies in the form of words on this blog or petitions you can rest assured those words will be as scathing as possible. And as unyielding to any supportive words from me as possible.

Thanks for your post. In general, I feel it is a very good thing that there is a sceptical attitude towards the concepts in any philosophy, as long as they remain concepts and don’t have a connection to any personal material.

I don’t really bother much with the Normal Man – Superman idea… I would describe myself as someone who’s becoming a normal man rather quickly, now that he’s been given the right encouragement! I can give you one recent example of what being a superman means to me. Not so long ago I found myself in the middle of a difficult and public situation, with a number of people involved. For whatever reason, I found myself able to ignore my usual reactions (even though I could still ‘feel’ them flowing past) and seemed to understand perfectly what everybody’s motivations in the situation were. I felt a tremendous sense of balance and being able to turn any way and deal with the differing viewpoints in terms they would understand. The understanding – which lasted for about 5 minutes or so – seemed to cure everything. What appeared to be a very difficult situation ‘collapsed’ incredibly quickly…. and I realized how being in a very healthy relationship with your own reactions/reflexes can immediately impact in the outside world in a very positive way!

Elena, I appreciate that you explained what is happening with you because I didn’t understand your recent posts.

I just don’t agree with the conclusions you make. Many ways are being addressed to expose Robert and the cult mentality, each thing working in its own time, each person necesssarily responsible for responding in the way that is most honest for them, as they find a new way. I hear judgment in your expression to all the rest of us that everyone but you falls short of rising to the occasion. How many people left because of your picketing? How many people left because of your blog posts over the last year? How many were able to dismiss your efforts as identified and lunatic, creating the exact opposite result of the gentle persuasion many others constantly work on? We can’t know, but what matters is you responded in the way that was most meaningful for you, and that was applauded with a “you go girl”.

There are many missing signatures I would expect to find on the petition by now. We know that signing helps cut loose the tentacles of control that have reached deep and it offers a plain and direct way to say no, collectively. I don’t understand or agree why others don’t sign it. To me it feels like a loss to all of us. Personally, I feel that the more spaces filled in by those never touched by the Fellowship make it less likely that ex-members will gain the benefit of signing for themselves. To me, the act of stopping the FoF is in essence between us. One new signature today.

I share your frustration and confusion at the slowness of the process but have to continue realizing that it contains hundreds of little processes at work, all in their own time. To respectfully acknowledge this seems important if freedom for all is what we want in the end. Don’t you agree that each of us must act from within, whether or not that meets with your approval? Fixing this from the bottom up?

“But I understand what’s going on. The ex members on the blog have an entirely one sided view of the FoF and any comments that fall outside of that one sided viewpoint simply don’t register to them.

It comes down to either taking the comments of someone like me at face value, and considering the possibility that their own viewpoint may not represent an all inclusive knowledge, or holding to their present views and branding everything outside of that a lie or a delusion.”

Why don’t you simple take Sarah Evarts’ good advice and apply all of this to yourself today? Is there any evidence you’ve changed your mind even one iota during the dialogue here?

DC 194
“On the way to verifying Influence C one naturally comes to see what is in their power and what is not – everything is in their power, is child’s play for them.

The one thing not in their power, or in their interest to control is forcing anyone to be present; as the whole value of it is in the yearning, the striving, the arriving at presence by way of a free will.

So that’s how I know.”

“I usually speak exclusively about my own experiences”

Please try to integrate these statements and give us one example (some would be even better) of how you have personally verified or experienced the above assertions about influence C. Taking Burton’s teachings out of the picture for one moment, how do you personally know and verify what influence C does or desires?
IMO honestly addressing this basic question is the only way you can convincingly discard our allegations of your perspective being “faith based”.
So, once again, how do you know?

What makes one believe that the only place that God and C influence and whatever you want to name a benevolent force that is invisible is only concentrated at that one man in Oregon House California. I see cherubim and seraphim going through a silo rolling down from the eternal source from the vast universe to the small little hole where a dead vineyard lies and many beautiful flowers, a misplaced Roman-Greek theater (we all paid for it right?), fountains of abundance, lovely people walking in fine garments, or for the same rented tuxedos. What makes one think that love and compassion and presence and consciousness come from the hand of a man who has hurt others so much? Because we all knew and still know that Robert Burton is not what you would call a nice person. But yes, being nice is not the issue. Being kind and loving is not enough. We need to suffer, to count our breaths, to look at art and try to decipher the message of older “schools”, to not gesticulate, to keep your hands in our pockets and our mouths and mainly minds and heart shut. I do not think the cherubim and seraphim would be able to breath freely down the bottom of the Oregon House base. They also need to be very careful because they could be easily sprayed with golden paint. Would be so lovely to have real angel wings with gliders and golden shiny paint, we can have them next to the Eros statue, maybe David could join all of them and have some fun during full and new (?) moons. What do you think dear?

Sorry, next post I will try to eliminate humor because I tempt you to laugh and your lower self is around the corner waiting for you to be happy and not on guard and he will bite you and you will lose your soul for ever and ever and by the 21st life time you will be a Pricilla, a Queen of the Desert, with no followers to manipulate and no cash to buy big, real, great art, to impress. So watch out, your lower self is always watching you. Read George Orwell he described him quite well, but we need to wait and see whether he actually used the numbers 4, 6 and 347.7. Please make a note of this.

That lower-self beast is actually part of you. Warning (and now I am getting serious, really): If you a sweet person who is still a member of the Cult Fellowship of Friends and you experience any uncomfortable feelings like anxiety, fears, panic, depression, if you keep on having recurring issues with alcohol, please try to love yourself and go and meet a psychologist! And please meet one who is not a member. Do not take medication to suppress more and more your feelings. There is a reason you feel the way you feel and there is so much help out there.

thanks for clarifying. I understand your disappointment, please rest assured that you are not alone in wanting the dissolution of FoF. My position in regards to what is going on with the blog and petition is basically aligned with the one expressed by Across the River at 197. Like you and others, I contributed to the petition (just in case anyone is curious, the account about mail fraud and phone call with Girard is mine, and anonimity is not something I requested – I am more than willing to sign it) and am more than a bit frustrated by what I perceive as the slow and apathic response of most ex members. Which I interpret in general as a sign that many are still on some level struggling under the influence of attitutes developed inside the cult.

On the other hand, we still have many members leaving, and it seems to me that the internal dissolution process of the cult as we know it is ongoing and unstoppable. The post by Ex-Cult Member at 184 was a very welcome gift this morning: it reminds me that even the often frustrating and at times seemingly pointless endeavour of engaging a discussion with DC can have some awesome positive effects and touch the conscience of other, less mind-trapped members. Even better, Ex-Cult Member testifies that the evidence of DC’s delusions is actually a stronger weapon against the Fellowship than the power of our convictions.

“…what is going on with the blog and petition…
and am more than a bit frustrated by what I perceive as the slow and apathic response of most ex members. Which I interpret in general as a sign that many are still on some level struggling under the influence of attitutes developed inside the cult.”

people is just having plenty of other ‘I’s about other things. Mind is multiple, and there is no real will. Insults are easy via net and words in general are.

Take away all comments by DC and all reponses to him (do it DC!), how would the blog itsef be doing?
The source of life of the opposite is in the opposite to itself and goes nowhere.

That’s why since I have been on the other side I didn’t had much interest in this repetitive discussion.

don’t need to answer to this, I’ll have to quit the blog side also for sometimes.

Is there not ‘due process’? We all probably want immediate destruction of the FOF, but things must take their appropriate time.
I did not realize it would take until now (my 52nd year on this planet) for my “spirit to be bent up to its full height”. Did not Whitman say “…then the architects will appear”…..Nigel.

Golb 203
I find your apparently detached stance of your latest post reflective of the sterile pseudo-spiritual superiority complex understandably afflicting a number of recent FoF departees. You still seem to be looking at the world from a cloud high above!
You complain about the repetitive discussion and yet your seemingly objective-sounding statements bring no new insight to it. “Mind is multiple, and there is no real will”: this is straight from Fellowship dogma ! Are you really convinced that being lost in the “many I’s” is the reason why most people don’t sign the petition?
Don’t need to answer to this either, just blowing off some steam!

Thank you for your efforts in relation to the petition. I was not talking about people’s past efforts who I have consistently supported and fought to make possible. I was talking specifically about the past week or two. Why do you take it out of the context I presented?

“I just don’t agree with the conclusions you make. Many ways are being addressed to expose Robert and the cult mentality, each thing working in its own time, each person necessarily responsible for responding in the way that is most honest for them, as they find a new way. I hear judgment in your expression to all the rest of us that everyone but you falls short of rising to the occasion. How many people left because of your picketing? How many people left because of your blog posts over the last year? How many were able to dismiss your efforts as identified and lunatic, creating the exact opposite result of the gentle persuasion many others constantly work on?”

What a gentle way of telling me that all you can see about my posts is the identification and the lunatic protecting your stand of not picketing or going to the extreme pressure I have gone into. This is precisely the difference. I have not disregarded the effort many have made to help members leave, show me one place where I disrespect that, what I’ve been pointing out is that sleeping in bliss with Daily Cardiac without addressing the petition fully is not what I am here for even if you and many of you are. I don’t agree with that, is that alright? Will you allow me to disagree?

“We can’t know, but what matters is you responded in the way that was most meaningful for you, and that was applauded with a “you go girl”.”

Where have you been Across the River? Fortunately it is all written down and no one can change it now. Maybe you would like to look back at the posts before I went picketing and tell me where you find the “you go girl”. The fact that three or four people supported that after it happened has nothing to do with your version of you go girl, throughout the blog here. How quickly we forget!

On the petition, involving people who don’t need a lifetime to realize that having a Cult investigated is something that should have been done from the moment it opened its doors, does not seem to me to be a detriment to the process of getting the petition moving. The idea that many hold that the Fellowship is falling apart on its own is a mistake. It is falling apart because it is under great pressure by everyone involved but it will go on and on and continue to rebuild itself if the pressure is stopped. Somebody have you any idea how many people have rejoined or are joining this year? The inner circle knows how to rebuild it and as long as they remain open they will rebuild it. That may continue to happen in the next ten or fifteen or twenty years which is the equivalent of what many of us spent there so the idea that we relax the pressure because it is falling apart on its own, is not convincing to me. Robert Burton and each one of his enablers, need to understand for once and for all that they cannot continue doing what they’ve been doing for a lifetime. No is no. It is not a half no or a half yes.

We are divided here and we’ve been at this for a long time. Hundreds of ex-members are willing to let the Fellowship continue, a few of us are not. Those of us who are clear about that can push the petition forward with ex-member’s signatures if they wish to sign it or other people who understand the need as many do. Families and friends who realize how much it harmed them and the student involved or the young men being seduced into abuse.

I don’t agree with you that this is a private Fellowship issue. Cults are a human cancer and all humans should come in and try to extirpate them . Not just the Fellowship but all Cults. In moving towards public action we would be helping thousands of people not ever joining any cult and putting pressure to stop not only the Fellowship and its abuses but other Cults which are dealing with child abuse.

The idea that this is a local phenomenon is like thinking one is the only one with pimps, pimples I mean. Utopias like the Fellowship arise in societies where people are trying to escape reality and that is in itself the danger. The maladie is deep and anything we do against it will help everyone, now and in the future.

If each of those people who already signed find four, just four more people to sign, we would have five hundred signatures, a decent enough number to guarantee that it will move forward a little. Not letting it fall is the issue today. That doesn’t mean that we can’t philosophize all we want on the blog in the meantime, but it means that the very few concrete actions that we can take to stop it continue to be set in place.

I am not trying to hurt the members, not even Robert. I am trying to stop them from continuing to hurt people which is what they no longer can stop doing themselves as Daily Cardiac clearly testifies for. They cannot see that they are hurting people and I don’t think it is worth waiting another generation for Robert to die or for them to come to terms with it.

If you really care about those people, organize serious help for them once the Fellowship closes. I have stood for not hurting, judging, mistreating or condemning anyone after they leave more than anyone else here, but I have also stood up for closing the possibility of The Fellowship of Friends Cult continuing to function. It and each of those people who think that it can continue, need to be stopped. Now. For ever. Closed. Kaput. Finito. Out. No more. It’s over dear, you cannot rape or help rape anybody else physically, emotionally, intellectually or sexually, not even with your silk gloves.

How many of those writing here all those beautiful posts exposing the damages of the Fellowship in their lives and those of others have not and will not sign the petition?

Can’t you see that that soft dialogue is what Daily Cardiac is aiming at so that you allow the Fellowship to continue because it doesn’t insult you with words but continues to rape people behind your back? And that with your soft dialogue you are telling the members that the blog has reached a place of acceptance? Why do you think Daily Cardiac does not address me but you who might turn in his favor? That that sweet tone and tactic that was so effective in Girard is trying to apply the same poison here? Poison, because reducing the horrors to reasonings that make it acceptable, is poison.

Nevertheless you’re absolutely right, don’t think I don’t understand you. I am brutal and extreme, I am at war, angry and hurt. I am not modeling or charming and I did not have fun in the Fellowship to wish to be that.
You can answer your own contest of who did more and what, helped more and won, if that is the phase now. We’ve been mostly fighting here since the beginning. It has been no promenade. May our differences help us continue to evolve.

P.D.
I’m extreme and brutal and was extremely and brutally abused by the Fellowship of Friends with its silk gloves like the rest of us. Why do you react as if you were patted with a stick? Because you condoned it for so long? I did too but I am not willing to insist on my mistake.

“The one thing not in their power, or in their interest to control is forcing anyone to be present; as the whole value of it is in the yearning, the striving, the arriving at presence by way of a free will.”

That is NOT what I heard Robert say on any number of occasions. I heard him say that while we may make efforts, it is C influence that controls how much we remember ourselves. I also heard him say that c influence determines who stays and who goes at Neverland Ranch North.

I don’t post this to debate any points with DC. I only wish the facts to appear somewhere so that the naive spiritual seeker can make a slightly more informed decision. In this realm of ideas, I’ve yet to see evidence of any sort of objective truth. Believe what you wish about life, liberty and the pursuit of the perfect tan, but report the facts.

I remember REB saying “It is not necessary to our aim to believe that we are special”. This is completely contradictory to his insistence that C-Influence only works with FOF members. Daily Cradiac – put that up your orifice and blow it out…..Nigel.

It comes down to either taking the comments of someone like me at face value, and considering the possibility that their own viewpoint may not represent an all inclusive knowledge, or holding to their present views and branding everything outside of that a lie or a delusion.

Your ideas, DC, and your repeated dissertations on them are not new, certainly not new to any of the ex-members. These are the same ideas that we ex-members have considered, pondered, and tested for whichever number of years we belonged to FOF. So give us some credit, we have “considered the possibility” of their value.

I will return the compliment to you and other members who may read this, by exhorting you, as many have done before:

Consider the possibility that your teacher’s true interest is to ride the train of those ideas for his own selfish purpose, that is: the best lifestyle that money from his followers can buy him, and the youngest, most innocent sex partners his enablers can supply. His unfailing love to you begins and ends there. In fact voicing this simple truth would instantly gain you a prompt dismissal from FOF and true freedom. How about that!

Lacuna Piñata would not be free if he were kicked out. He would recriminate himself endlessly for having lost a conscious school and then would leap at the chance to pay some significant amount of money to rejoin. His mind binds him to the Fellowship. He has the power to liberate himself, but only if he is willing to endure the uncertainty that accompanies real examination of one’s beliefs and values.

Being in Oregon House, I see a few things, hear a few things too… The F.O.F. Collin Office is officially closed and up for rent; the Apollo D’Oro is on the brink of shutting down, two more of our inner circle brothers/sisters are leaving this week and the blog has attracted the honest contributions of another writer…

Things seem to have become tangled up; when things don’t go as my expectations ‘warranted’, it’s encouraging to my soul, because it’s proof that I’ve been looking into the telescope from the opposite end and that I need to become what I expect of others and external life living by breathing in my breaths so to exhale…

Tangled, in the sense that there are 2 distinct Petitions (and truly I see no good reason to mix them, to see them as dependently-mortally connected), i.e., the blog and the signature scroll: one petition (the blog) is getting people to consider their position in the F.O.F. and to begin the long and difficult unplugging from the Matrix, another (the petition) is asking the Matrix itself for change, quest of consceince and a space for public support and attention to a cult phenomenon taking place in Oregon House… Sorta like Neo going to the Machine City to get support so to transcend Mr. Smith, who is has become a kind of computer virus, i.e., Neo’s ‘other’…

Both ‘petitions’ are doing their jobs well and no one group of people or persons could ever take all the glory (or pain) for making it happen, because we are all breathing into this world at the same time; sure, it gets personal, though this is exactly what has created the cult in the first place… A cult is not created by its teacher, it’s created by those who reflect what they project towards the teacher, no?

That’s my feeling, that the F.O.F. was a cult of myself and not Robert, though certainly it’s also that, a cult of himself and allot of other selves; so, when one person leaves, this is a colossal and internal graduation to be celebrated above and beyond our expectations of death to the form itself, that will happen as a natural ‘effect’ of the current ’cause’, without our poetic yearning…

When our personal vendettas go ahead of noticing what is actually happening and focuses on what isn’t, there’s no room for ‘How can I make things better?’ to occur; that’s the #3 of a dying man’s apology-list I recently watched on the GF video site (#3 being the one he says we most forget to ask after apologizing)…

The blog and the petition are connected, though not by an umbilical cord; I think that was cut when we directed its sails out towards non-FOF-members and too, I wonder how it is that it doesn’t have non-FOF-members signatures on it? A citizen’s concern is a citizen’s concern to the governor, so long as it’s an informed signature…

The posting of DC (and our replies) are on an Archetypal level, IMO (and not personal), and speak for something that every student currently in Oregon House is looking for, conscientious and personal dialog with consceince and gut feelings, the movement from the head to the heart and back again, to get the ‘No Trespassing’ sign torn down from the brand new slide set that’s been waiting in the back yard of our souls for how long?

Alongside the real results I see and hear in Oregon House, the blog is the Harley and the petition is a kind of flag for those who do not own Harleys or simply cannot keep up… The petition is growing and has awhile to go to catch up to its parent’s footsteps: the blog is public domain too, BTW and the petition can be sent out at any time to any particular ‘target’ in mind and sent out again as the signatures increase… Calling upon the public at large to also sign it would be a good move; advertise it in the Appeal Democrat, the Sacramento Bee, simply for exposure and readership…

Unlike before, I do not support a violent and painful cutting of the umbilical cord; we have enough work to do on the results of the first time that happened… We are all in this together so long as love remains our seance and by and large, this blog is no proof of the opposite.

“How can I make it better?” is a great question.

—-

DC: when the seed inside the acorn begins to weep, that buildup of ‘extras’ will be what cracks the acorn’s armor and not an external ‘shock’… I feel for all of my friends in the FOF, even those supporting Robert, because I know and can sense what lies in store for them, for their soul’s purge-time; if I could, I would transport them all to another planet to save them from this ruthless and awesome fire, though, that knight in shinning armor thing doesn’t work anymore; when you look across the dinner table and see your name on the pepper shaker that god’s using on her salad, well, don’t start asking allot of questions and by no means go looking for the salt…

Uno:
re non-ex-members signing the petition, doesn’t it begin with the words “We are past members of the Fellowship of Friends…” and include the words shortly thereafter, “our petition”? i.e. it introduces itself as a petition specifically from ex-members, not the general public.

So how could never-members sign it truthfully? Also, I’d doubt that they would want their neighbors and co-workers to think that they had indeed been members of the cult.

Thanks very much for your OH news – how encouraging that the FoF might be crumbling as a result of sincere doubts from the members. I think that folks freely leaving is healthier than folks having their cult taken away from them by some “authority”.

“I think that folks freely leaving is healthier than folks having their cult taken away from them by some “authority”.”

That process does seem more organic somehow, doesn’t it? And it certainly does seem healthier for those navigating their way out for their own, hard-won reasons. With eyes open people can choose their path of healing, and back out into the daylight.
For all I know, even some truths may be finite; but I think we all know by now, that lies (at least all the ones we’ve seen so far), no matter the scale they exist on, just seem to have a limited life span. Sooner or later they are exposed.

Maybe the petition needs to be less exclusive and include other human beings who have been in likewise cults or who are savvy to such phenomenons and support in some way via their lifestyle the dissolution of such; certainly I would not ask a guy working in Home Depot to sign it, unless of course he was “informed” and wished to be informed and on that premise of wish he could rightly sign the petition ‘spiritually’ speaking, IMO…

To me, it makes no sense to ask a public agency (FBI, CIA, Govenment, IRS, etc.) to stand by and support an ‘exclusive’ petition, without including the public too, which it already has an implied duty to support and assist:

(Making the petition exclusive may be subconsciously tacking up a ‘Stay Out’ sign on our club house door; being read by the very people we’re asking to consider our 500 desired signatures.) (?)

However that unfolds; yes, you’re right, it’s ‘our’ petition, though ironically, it’s the ‘our’ that we’re trying to reintegrate into the heart-condition of humanity… Maybe we need to change the wording at the beginning and end so that its middle can grow with humanity and not just our private affairs (?)

No doubt that the cult in Oregon House is no different than those that have been around for thousands of years on Earth; so, it’s a human community thing and I see no reason not to ask other previous cult members to sign it or the “informed” and then ‘concerned’ public at large to get in on it…

Change the wording, make it less personal and more inclusive, then I could get my mom and dad to sign it… Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Our parents signing the petition! Not counting our brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, etc.

If I could be sure of my cat’s take on it, I’d hit the Space bar for him.

“I think that folks freely leaving is healthier than folks having their cult taken away from them by some “authority”.”

Though, really, here in Oregon House, as deeply entrenched as the FOF is; the “authority” will be the consceince of those looking at how it all unravels: I sense, even if the church status was taken away, the FOF would still ‘work’ as another ‘entity’ under another title, with a different ‘leader’… So, unless I am missing something, the taking away by any other than themselves cannot really happen… I trust the operations of the heart (and the Mind), because, if it moves to Mexico or Europe, the mind will go there too… You can take the cult out of Oregon House, though you can’t take the cult out of the Organ House.

Uno – I agree, but this is how the petition has been presented, and per Jack, it can’t be changed after the fact, as 100+ folks have signed “the check” already. Can you imagine signing a petition in favor of something, then wording was added after you signed that you would not have agreed with? This is a safeguard against such behind-the-back manipulations. (I am not implying that changing the wording to be more inclusive is manipulative, just pointing out the situation.)

“I think that folks freely leaving is healthier than folks having their cult taken away from them by some “authority”.”

I agree Sharon. There is nothing more empowering than leaving freely and openly after coming to the understanding for oneself that Robert and the Fellowship is something bogus, unhealthy and fraudulent. Being forced to leave or asked to leave can result in a prolonged and painful process.

This is not to say that the petition is not a useful and important element in exposing and weakening the Fellowship

Uno, thank you for your posts. I thought I had to dress up in gear to read it but was happily surprised, especially by the second one.

News are good but not good enough. The only really good news from the Fellowship is that it no longer exists, that its members have been helped in every way they can possibly be helped and that the whole lot of us managed to get the whole lot of us out of hell.

While I agree completely with Sharon that it would have been lovely if we had all walked out in a year or two because we had in fact not totally succumbed to the poison, I am convinced that too many will keep finding prospective students as long as it is open. They will anyway, with some other kind of a cult but once they failed once, they will continue to fail because repetition is contagious when one can’t change one’s level of being through suffering and transformation, failing each time faster as if the circle closed in on one’s self. At least that was learnt.

Sharon, do you think people would be very ashamed to be associated with the Fellowship?

For me there is no shame in having loved innocently a School of Consciousness and true human beings which is what I believe most of us were convinced to believe. “The Arc” to save culture for humanity, “beauty” to remember that we were worth more than love, “Friendship” to bear with each other’s limitations, respect for each other’s struggle, commitment to “work, work, work, more effort”. Art. And fortunately in the midst of the darkness hundreds of times people like you sprinkled the horror with the beauty of your music. What is there to be ashamed of? That we loved until our soul broke dead? Not quite yet if we can stop it before.

Who could be ashamed of the super efforts that we made convinced that we were building a more human community? The vineyard is dying but in the times of the vineyard hopefully there was something more genuine than what we got in the end. The exmembers of that time seem a little less messed up than the recent ones or maybe it’s just that after 15 years of healing they have had the opportunity to laugh.
When the true enablers are shocked with the news that it is closed, hopefully someone will walk the path of recognition and let them know that some of us know that they did not know what they were doing and what they did do, they did it convinced of the illusion. No one hurts anyone CONSCIOUSLY, it is a law. That is why we are called upon to take care of each other’s unconsciousness.

Robert will say that he paid each of those boys, that he paid them well. That they lived in a setting that they’ll never forget.

The people I’ve asked to sign the petition do not need to know more than the fact that men in their twenties have to go to bed with a man in his sixties, seventies? only for as long as they are young enough because then they are sent back to the vineyard with a grin from the others who look at them like whores who lost their beauty and deserve what they finally got. Those whores who never mixed with the rest and actually behaved as if they were superior, the chosen ones by the divine master looking down on the rest of us who worked to support them. When they tell their story then they might say, those members who look at us like whores but paid to put us here with their unconditional support of Robert.

Yes Uno, we are in this all together. It would have been harder if it were on one’s own.

No one needs to be too informed to sign a petition for the Dalai lama nor does any regular human being have difficulty deciding that there are rocks in a river that makes such a loud noise and an investigation will at least tell us what actually happened with a lot of things.

After thirty five years of silence, hiding and pretending and seeing members cover up the muck layer after layer and throwing people out if they tried to unmask any of it, there are a lot of things that need to be known.

When hidden life comes out to the light, the soul breathes and the human being learns that there is a whole where it never wishes to fall again. We do learn… in the long run.

I contacted an ex-member from the Bogotá center today who I had not seen in years and she greeted me so lovingly that I knew we were friends. She said it would be a pleasure to sign the petition with the little she’d experienced. The same with another member yesterday but have not yet seen his signature.

My Godfather signed it or my mother I should say, who is now 84. The greatest waste of my time in the Fellowship was not seeing more of him. There are very few Angels in a physical body and he is one of them! I have never known anyone give more love and ask for nothing like he does. He is the only person I’ve known long enough and never had a fight with!!!

When I told him about the Fellowship being a Cult, he said, “Well, we all knew that!” And went on as if it had never existed! but he never told me what he thought about it while I was in! Perhaps he is not the kind of Angel I wish to become!

Sharon: “I think that folks freely leaving is healthier than folks having their cult taken away from them by some “authority”.”

I agree. And people who leave when they are not psychologically ready many times go find a cult replacement. There are plenty of them to choose from. It really is a personal process that one goes through.

207
Dear Elena, I believe the only differences I have with you are what methods are most efficient in getting results of two kinds. First to close down the Fellowship and second to give all concerned some space to find their own most authentic response, which IMO is an important step in healing.

The soft dialogue with DC is just another tool for both purposes, as specifically mentioned by the welcomed post 184 of Ex-Cult Member.

***********

Sharon, unoanimo and all:

The petition is presented to the public by past members but the last sentence invites all to sign with the words: “We ask all who share concern for these conditions to sign this petition and ask for an official investigation into these affairs.” I don’t think there’s a conflict in the wording.

I believe Jack is working on moving the letters to a link rather than having them posted under the petition.

***********

Who would disagree that it’s better for people to leave the cult in their own time?

Personally, my knowledge of the continuing day-to-day REALITY OF ABUSE lead me to decide that intervention was the lesser of two evils, particularly with the support network growing in a healthy way.

Why? Because I did not want to see a group of mindless policemen destroying something that I, at least at one time thought I loved.

Why? Because I thought some naive and innocent people would be hurt.

Why? Because I saw that leaving was perhaps the most valuable experience for me. I did not want to deprive people of leaving under their own initiative.

Why? Because I did not want to let vengeful thinking penetrate my life. I wanted to take responsibility. I was naïve.

Why? Because my experiences were not so dark. I had some wonderful times and was never approached by Robert sexually.

Why? Because the young men that I knew well, right or wrong, were mostly ok with regard to their experiences with Robert.

I have not supported it for all of these reasons.

But now I have a change of heart. My change of heart stems from a different understanding (for myself) of the aim of the petition. I no longer see the petition as an instrument of revengeful destruction, but rather as an instrument of pressure. Well intentioned pressure to encourage change and escape.

I expect this is not the aim that many have for the Petition but it is my aim.

There are many injustices in life and the FOF may not be the worst. But we are or were connected to the FOF and therefore have more responsibility with the Fellowship than we might with the Catholic Church or other organizations that fostered hurtful activities. The Catholics sometimes turned a blind eye and some priests continued their abusive ways as a result for many years. This is not something I want to mimic.

Personally, I think for the Petition to be more than mildly successful, we still need more men who are willing to confidentially speak in the event of an investigation. So if you are one of those men that was sexually harassed, consider the option of speaking about your experiences. I am not a lawyer, but If you felt repeated pressure to have sex with him, then you were probably legally harassed – especially if you thought your position was dependent on having sex.

Keep in mind that no matter how well you were treated, you have given your most creative and productive years. You have given the time normally allotted for developing your talents and skills and setting the foundation for life. You may want to help protect others from that fate.

So, after all this time, I am endorsing the petition and will sign today. It was not an easy decision for me. I still have some fond feelings for many students that are still in. I think many still in hope for change but have no idea how to help it along. With luck, this will help bring about the change that many of us hoped for even while we were in.

I do not think the FOF will be destroyed by the petition. I do not think that people will be arrested. I doubt if people will be hurt. But the Fellowship has been remiss at policing itself and a little pressure from outside might help motivate students to either leave or at least not further the abuses. Maybe some will find ways to fix the problems from within (though I doubt it). It will possibly help to inform potential new students before they are naively taken in.

Please consider thinking about the petition in this way and sign if it makes sense to you.

“Please try to integrate these statements and give us one example (some would be even better) of how you have personally verified or experienced the above assertions about influence C.”

Actually, a few people asked me the same question, almost word for word, a few pages back. I believe I replied with at least one detailed answer.

The essence of this issue is that no one can transfer a verification they have had regarding the existence or methods of a spiritual entity (Influence C) to another person. Verifications are by nature personal and non-transferable. Especially in this arena where no ex member has yielded a truth regarding FoF/RB to any current member I doubt that any explanation of mine would be acceptable to you. But, as I said, I did give an honest attempt 4 or 5 pages ago.

Have you verified presence/self-remembering? If so, could you explain to someone how you did that? Or what consciousness is? What the third state is, and how you “navigated” to it? These verifications would by necessity come before verifying Influence C.

If any answer I gave you would be deemed satisfactory by you, in all likelihood, you not be here on the blog to read it. You would probably be spending your free time on the official FoF website.

An investigation means research in depth on a subject.
May be RB will ends up in jail for tax evasion as Al Capone? Who knows?
The Incorruptible trapped him with that; they were not able to put him in jail with all the crimes he committed.
The INCORRUPTIBLE!
History reserve many surprises.

#216, Uno
Thanks nice post. Yes, I agree, this blog is so totally open (by it’s own nature it has to be so) and that’s it’s big whopping strength. The questioning of current sincere students pulls the rug out from under that fake Santa with the black boots and funny beard whose breath smells unforgettably like oxidizing semen.

I signed the petition because I did not want to resist or oppose it in anyway and I felt my own silence to be that, yet I’m still not sure it is the most effective tool in our tool box. Nevertheless, we need to use every tool that we can legally find and continually question ourselves “How can I help?”. In the end we be able to do a post-mortem to examine cause of death: X,Y or Z? I think it will be like an answer to a multiple choice question: “all of the above”.

Old Fish, Elena, yes, if we each hadn’t loved the super celestial eternal hope of the Fellowship promise with all our heart’s might it wouldn’t hurt so much or deserve the 54 pages of this big outpour. The good news is each of us had something to learn – and we learned it big time – the bad news is that it cost more than any of us had ever reckon’d. And I won’t cover it with a “C’est la vie”, ’cause I don’t think it has to be that way. We can help others to avoid the same pothole. Yes, we can.

DC, I am sorry, I must have missed (or possibly forgotten?) your previous writing, so unless it is terribly inconvenient, I would appreciate a repost or rewrite. I believe you must be aware by now that, either willingly or unwillingly, you are stuck with playing the role of FoF spokesperson in this venue, and your answers as well as your silences become food for thought for many, both in and out of the imaginary divide. And I assume you are interested in building credibility with the readers his blog. So please do us all a favour by describing once more, as best as you can, your personal experiences and verifications of C influence’s powers and intent. And don’t be afraid, this is not the Spanish Inquisition !

“Have you verified presence/self-remembering? If so, could you explain to someone how you did that? Or what consciousness is? What the third state is, and how you “navigated” to it? These verifications would by necessity come before verifying Influence C.”

I verify presence whenever I am present, obviously, and presence/self remembering/third state in my personal experience is just that, an experience of heightened awareness that takes place in the moment, not necessarily related to any previous or present efforts. I have also verified that there are many types of higher-altered states, and many shades of presence. Some of these states I have reached using specific techniques like breathing, yoga or meditation, some through exposure to particular places/people/impressions, some through the use of entheogens, and finally there are states that seem to have descended upon me for no knowable reason, as a sort of “grace”. So I think I can honestly say I have made a number of verifications in the area of states and presence and connecting with the Sacred, but none of them involve an entity called “influence C” that works exclusively with a cult called the Fellowship of Friends and a teacher called Robert Burton.

When I was in the cult I thought I had verified influence C by means of signs and synchronicities, but later I found out that signs and synchronicities are an universal phenomena and very much still present in my ex-member life, so one thing I have learned for sure is to be more careful with my intellectual interpretations of what said manifestations mean and imply.

“The essence of this issue is that no one can transfer a verification they have had regarding the existence or methods of a spiritual entity (Influence C) to another person. Verifications are by nature personal and non-transferable.”

I agree with you that “spiritual” verifications are by nature personal. But there are different kinds of “spiritual” verifications, and this is what I am trying to understand in relation to your verifications of influence C. One thing is experiencing deep mystical truths while being in a “higher state”, another is building intellectual beliefs on the basis of emotions experienced while being in a “higher state”, another altogether is accepting someone else’s cosmology on the basis of the “higher state” one experiences when being with this person.
I hope my distinctions are clear, otherwise please let me know !

Religious institutions are in a great number helpful and arranging communities.

Most of us are born into something in particular concerning the “first touch” with the level outside our physical body and our intellectual fixations.

The religions of this planet are the first field to come in touch with it. The techniques are hymns, meditation, listening to a monotonous voice, to fix one’s eyes, to press the bottom together (FOF), to inhale incense …..

Most of the theistic religions/institutions claim the immediate vicinity of GOD. The truth is for those institutions their “property” given by the higher force of God. The way of “experiencing” “God” in a mystic way is heretical.
Marguerite Porete/Poirette etc. (relapsa) associated with the Beguine movement or Miguel Molinos experienced God in a mystic way but they refused to formulate this experience appropriate to the dogma and they had to pay the price.

Another dangerous aspect is a pseudo-mysticism moved back from life, moved back from “life people”.

Real mysticism takes the human being to life. It is free of fear, free of regression it takes place in the first reality of our planet and it opens out the way to all beings.

It enables human beings to be an “I” not an “i” and not something in a poikilotherm manner. The masks disappear we are alive.

All mistakes, all weakness, all our inadequacy is accepted and reconciled with our selves. I accept my inheritance given by birth. I am not fixed and bound to shake it off in an act of capture or dogged determination.
It doesn’t mean that I am in agreement with all my weakness and my mistakes.

It is Zimbardo’s quote: We mustn’t give place to evil or it is a quote of Augustinus: Ama et fac quod vis! But without any over-estimation of one’s abilities.

The search for the miraculous the search for a profound life drives many people to the tentacles of a guru.

They are dissatisfied with their religion, their roots, their families and they cure it in a brutal way with root and branch.
If a student learns with a teacher (it is not necessary) he/she/it should be the valuable replenishment of this teacher.

Physical and intellectual abuse is the absence of love and no gate to spiritual growth.

It is a dark equipment and the results are sad for our societies. In the worst case a refusal to live, a refusal to act as a real world citizen.

Standing in front of the daily abuse and praying thousands of reasons why abuse should be reduced, very, very gentle. It is the wash and go of the abuse without water!

Life should be no place for justification, ego-satisfaction or self-fulfilment.

The Way is astoundingly beautiful for everybody who has the courage to do that.

Every human being is unique and every human being can find his/her/it’s own spiritual way but WE might have a look at sorrow.

If a “teacher” refuses to inform a pupil or student about his suitability he might be a guru.

If money and donations are the main thing he is a guru.

Many methods of the spiritual path are dangerous for healthy persons as well. They can provoke fear and emotions that seemed to be forgotten torment the person.

Parapsychological phenomena like precognition, telepathy and an intoxicating feeling of omnipotence and omnipresence can be activated.

If the person sinks into this make-believe world he will be in a very dangerous situation.
It is the “Craving” for pseudo-mysticism.

I like allegories sometimes.

Some Bloggers might be fixed in the cult settings, they seem to experience a sort of “white blindness”.

Gurdjieff’s methods are not free of his attachment to the personal sadistic side of his shimmering character. This “sadistic” touch is contagious for some of his students and it continues until today.

It obscures the Way towards a mature development. I am shaking gently that sacred cow und you can face the results.

I do it but first of all the reactions are anger, fear and rejection.

But concerning the petition and the other efforts it is quite simple:

How can I/We enable these victims to act as WORLD CITIZENS and to bear this experience with their human dignity given by birth.

Every day is time for the FOF to change like a chameleon and every day is another day to catch new victims in the spider’s web.
It doesn’t matter if Burton was not responsible for his actions. It doesn’t matter if many of his supporters are involved.
It should be investigated and crime is crime.

We can DISCUSS FROM HELL TO HAVEN’S GATE that doesn’t improve the facts.

“The essence of this issue is that no one can transfer a verification they have had regarding the existence or methods of a spiritual entity (Influence C) to another person.”

—

This sounds very much like my first prospective meeting; thank you for the flash back. It was the look in the director’s eyes, I knew that look and it knew me, so, there I dove, like a 400lb albatross into its own coffee cup of sea water.

DC,

It’s a pretty innocent request from one lover to another to tell them a story; stories are not impossible… I have tons of stories concerning ‘the other’ (an prior to meeting the FOF)… So, fear not, it is possible to “transfer” the sense of your own joy and spirit tenacity to another; every human being appreciates a honest handshake, a shyless eye to eye recognition of their humble place on the Earth, a real laugh and a real wry joke…

Truly, I do not feel that transferring the actual “verification” of anything is the issue in or out of the FOF, since its impossibility is moot (as you pointed out), after all, it’s your essence, your being-ness, your bloodstream and your cosmos you’re looking out from and into another, who’s also looking out into you simultaneously… I believe that we all understand that to learn we cannot borrow another persons mistakes; and if we do not know, it pretty much works that way anyways.

“How can I make it better?” Is a great question.

Instead of dwelling (maybe you are and maybe you aren’t) via the habit we all learned in the FOF, of thinking about what we couldn’t do (yet) because the teacher said so, or some label has yet to fit our insatiable mind’s wandering about its limitless possibilities tomorrow, dig deeper and find out what does work in your cosmos today: to me, love is transferable and that’s all we really wished on from a ‘School of Love’…

Being yourself, from the core, is “transferring” all your “verifications” outwards to Everything (including humans).

If you cannot be a lover away from the Beloved, then what use was the Beloved?

When I considered to leave FOF the first time I had fear. I was afraid that I am making a wrong decision, that I did not consider everything, that my friends will stop being my friends etc. I looked at every possible way to compromise to stay in FOF and be true to myself at the same time. To leave or not to leave was the question. One of my friends mentioned that even though he believes that Robert is a fool, he values the students above ‘life people’ as they are three-dimensional. I was thinking about it as I was driving in Marysville, looking at ‘two-dimensional people’. Suddenly there was a man on the bicycle in the t-shirt with 44 on the back. I took it as an omen and decided to go to wash dishes at the Galleria that same day. On the way back home there was a song on the radio “Hotel California”. The last words made me cry:

“Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
relax, said the night man,
We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave! ”

Was it C influence telling me that it is hard to leave the cult? Or my own mind’s creation?

The following poem is an English translation of the one which Bruno Ganz recites through the film The Sky over Berlin.
It sounds very beautiful in the original German.

“Als das Kind Kind war”.

When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

When the child was a child,
Berries filled its hand as only berries do,
and do even now,
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw,
and do even now,
It had, on every mountaintop,
the longing for a higher mountain yet,
and in every city,
the longing for an even greater city,
and that is still so.

Just a note about synchronicity, seeing 44’s 6’s or whatevers. I collect tiny figurines of dragons, so whenever I go traveling I’m always looking for unusual ones to buy (I usually find them). At one point during a trip to Europe I decided to spend a day looking out for frogs instead, I found them, suddenly there were frogs everywhere where there had been none before. If you are not “looking” for 44’s you will not see them, even if they drive by on a bicycle. We all every one of us see what we want to see and find things when we look for them.

I was sad today; realizing that all those people I considered friends and had them over for dinner and we shared so many fine moments (I thought) did not even bother to call or ask how am I doing. Then I just had a lovely evening with two friends I’ve only known for a year and have nothing to do with a cult environment and it was so refreshing. This is the oddest situation, isn’t it? To know someone for a good 19 years and to have been asked to not have any contact with them any more.

One of the things I never learned at this cult is to feel what I feel; always that going beyond the ordinary state; always being active internally to consume more moments, to not be “asleep”, to do more to be more. If I do not love what I am at this very moment there is nowhere to go to.

People in the FOF have put their lifes in the hands of an unstable person. I only lived in OH for a year. And I was only 22 then. And Robert was not teaching. It was a good year. There are many lovely and caring people in the FOF. There are a lot of hurt people in the FOF. When Robert was not teaching we had the chance to be for each other I thought. He is now imposing his perverse world on all of his followers. It permeates our lifes and the lifes of our loved ones. It is ugly and it gets stuck in your throat (well literally for some…).

There is a large difference between the inability to verify someone else’s states and the very fact that Robert has ended up bringing pain and suffering to people who have trusted him. There is a difference between my perception of reality and that of yours and the fact that the level of corruption in the FOF has exceeded any acceptable level.

“Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness,” writes Evolutionary Psychologist Geoffrey Miller, “but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness-subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects.” Fitness-faking is the extreme effect of technological mediation, and according to Miller, it’s out-pacing us: “Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it. With the invention of the printing press, people read more and have fewer kids. (Only a few curmudgeons lament this.) With the invention of Xbox 360, people would rather play a high-resolution virtual ape in Peter Jackson’s King Kong than be a perfect-resolution real human.” Communication theorists call fake relationships with TV characters “parasocial relationships,” and as Miller puts it, “Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends.” Mediation isn’t inherently bad, as it has the potential to augment our experiences as much as it does to obstruct them, but I think sometimes we have to take a step back — maybe even a step away — from all of these screens and things.
Do you ever find that your most emotional moments are during or after movies? Do you sometimes feel like you go through more experiences vicariously that you do directly? This is an idea that scares me more than most anything else. Here is one of my favorite passages on the subject. This is a quote from writer Nina Simons, and she says it better than I ever could:
It’s important that we gather ourselves to participate more fully in the stories of our time and our lives. There’s a serious threat of couch-potatoism in our culture, and we need to make a conscious effort to avoid it and to recognize the enormous energy that comes from participation. It’s easy to get bogged down in the circumstantial and mundane, but if we connect to our passion, that in itself will be regenerative; we won’t have to wait for the energy, it will be there. But how do we connect to that passion? One of my favorite phrases, which a friend taught me, is that we need to pay ‘exquisite attention’ to our responses to things — noticing what makes our flame glow brighter. If we pay attention to those things, we’ll be able to catch the flame and feed it.
Sometimes I think we need to get out of our routine, to get out of our pattern, to talk to people we wouldn’t normally talk to. Change jobs. Move away. Gather up some friends, go outside, and play football, instead of playing Madden NFL 06. Take it upon yourself to change something about your day. Anything. Even if you have a bad experience, you will have had an experience. You will have learned something that you can take with you next time. And if you have a good experience, remember what gave you the feeling and do it again. Soon.
Technological mediation isn’t going to go away. In fact, it’s only going to become more pervasive. At the most basic level, technological mediation creates an illusion. When augmenting our experiences, it makes us feel closer to our environment, but it obstructs them by adding a layer of abstraction between us and our environment — the latter of which when often do not notice or just forget about once the technology has been assimilated into our world of media. As Pat Califia puts it, “We have to find a way to synthesize the rhythms of nature with our electronic lives. A fuzzy-headed, sentimental longing for bucolic utopia will not save us from toxic waste or nuclear weapons. We need a world where we can have both computers and campfires.” Indeed, from language to advertising to technology, all of our experiences are mediated to some degree. We just need to be more mindful of what constitutes authentic experience, find a path through our mediated world, find a balance, live without dead time, live an authentic life without artifice.”

“The essence of this issue is that no one can transfer a verification they have had regarding the existence or methods of a spiritual entity (Influence C) to another person.”

That’s ballony! Hope you spell it like that.

One might not be able to transfer the actual experience but one can convey the understandings, the process, the inspiration, the suffering and the enlightenment.

You’re just avoiding the question because you haven’t had any such states. You can’t fly when you’re tied up to the formatory apparatus but when you let go of it dearest, one day when you actually realize what you are dying to achieve, you will slide into another dimension by the grace of the beings in it who have heard your souls knocking in perfect silence. The few I’ve experienced and not any for a long time (for the Fellowship was a place in which I stopped making such efforts, wasting my time with mind and physical efforts to keep busy so that I wouldn’t realize where I was, have always been a gift and not because I did not make the effort but because the hierarchy must help the seeker understand oneness and unity or individuality and the whole. It is the greatest and most beautiful realization a young human being like us can have, although I’m sure others might experience totally different things just as great. I just cannot imagine anything greater than to know yourself and everything else too for even a few hours of ones life.

DC, you’re a beautifully loyal human being, just like Girard is with the Fellowship. Don’t waste the energy you have feeding formatory imagination. What you wish from the Fellowship is not possible in the Fellowship but it is possible if you open up to mankind and yourself. Your own perfect self in the depth of your being. Self remembering is a key and if you seriously hold it long enough, lovingly enough, considerately enough, it’ll open every other dimension that you are seeking but you can never open anything IMHO if you are trying to avoid this dimension and get to another one. That’s imagination, that’s cult, that’s utopia, that’s evasion…

Each one of us has experienced higher states in different moments of our life. Children practically live in a higher state compared to us and if we explore it carefully we’ll know we lost a contact with the world when we fell into the identifications of our karma. If you allow your childhood state to tell you what you’ve lost and guide you back into what you’d like to recover, you’ll be on a very practical path to regaining what the Fellowship never offered nor knew how to reach. Robert lost himself in the laberynth of his craving. It drove him crazy to have that much freedom, love and power but mostly our identification with the imaginary enlightened being that he was unable to reach. He took advantage of it to provide himself with sex.

You’re not a stupid man DC and yet you’re beginning to turn round and round this blog in a vicious circle without answers. We’ve all done it and it is very good to see it because it shows us our repetitiveness. Watch it. It’ll show you how small you are but it’ll also show you that you belong to a community that can help you, that loves you, that enjoys your presence and kicks you so that you decrystallize. I’ve suffered all those and made others suffer similarly.

This blog too is addictive but at least we are now addicted to each other and not to Robert. An adult falling in love with his community is like a teenager falling in love with her first boyfriend. We will overcome that too but it is a must in the process of becoming mature. And in that addiction at least we can tell each other our truths and cut each other’s lies. It is the healthiest pruning. I can see that you too are addicted to the pleasure of being together. Isn’t it wonderful to have references that are not just you and your little life without horizon? That is definitely what it is for me. On my own there is no horizon but together the whole world opens like a gift. On my own self’s doorstep I can fly beyond this world but I wish to be here where I’ve not yet had the opportunity to arrive. Most in our generation grew up without community. School, career, job, marriage, were not community but competition.

This love, this infinite love that comes from being with other human beings is our greatest, most fundamental reason to be.
Please enjoy it. We are welcome to it, you and everyone else in the Fellowship too.

I am no conscious being nor pretend to be but I do wish to be more and more human each day and what I’ve lived, I’ve lived for this love.

It is wonderful to hear you beginning to talk from your own wounded being, allowing the tapes to rest. Thank you for being here.

Ex cult member, can I call you Sprout? or Little spirit from the beyond? or Little River Fountain?

Do you remember the beauty new members brought with them and how we all wanted to give them our angles so that we could brainwash them very quickly with our knowledge? Your energy is like those new member’s but we are clear here that what you bring is precious and doesn’t need to be touched or changed or remodelled. Thank you for your posts.

Are you one of the very few people who gave me so much of their love? Are you Judith T? or Lorraine? or Richard and William? You are longed for where ever you are friends. Don’t worry about loosing your friends, give them time, we don’t really loose each other. There is a dimension in which we are all together.

The essence of this issue is that no one can transfer a verification they have had regarding the existence or methods of a spiritual entity (Influence C) to another person.”

Elena – “That’s ballony! Hope you spell it like that.
One might not be able to transfer the actual experience but one can convey the understandings, the process, the inspiration, the suffering and the enlightenment.”

Only if the individual you are conveying these things to has an open mind.

I think you’re raising some very valid points in your last post about actual, physical participation. The physical aspect is essential to a proper, basic balance within the individual. From conversations I had within the fellowship, it felt like people who worked those long hard hours in the heyday of the vineyard enjoyed some of the most authentic experiences on offer….

Meetings in the Gurdjieff teaching are usually followed by a ‘Movements’ class which is often as educational (if not more) as the meeting itself! I regularly come away feeling that the ‘teaching cycle’ has been really completed by participation in both…

In the fellowship physical exercise and labor really takes a back seat to the cultivation and enjoyment of impressions. I joined the fellowship as my sporting career was winding down, and I was doing a lot of writing (hence in front of PC much of the time), and the school priorities tended to reinforce the ‘couch-potatoism’! Too much talk and not enough action!! So it doesn’t offer much help to make even an elementary balancing of centres. One of the very best meetings I can remember was followed by a 5 mile hike over hill and dale. Now that was good.

I really enjoy walking my chocolate labrador nowadays. I have to become aware of his ‘state’ to feel that we are walking in harmony as a pair – just as with my own body. This is very fulfilling.

Dragon.

“Gurdjieff’s methods are not free of his attachment to the personal sadistic side of his shimmering character. This “sadistic” touch is contagious for some of his students and it continues until today.”

Well I don’t know where your getting your information from, but I’ve experienced nothing like it. I’ll also point out that G. handed down his teaching mostly through women (Mdme de Salzmann and Henriette Lannes) and they were certainly not sadistic in any shape or form! Sadism tends to be a male preserve.

It looks like you’re far too ready to lump all groups together as cults without any observable first-hand evidence of your own. Correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe if we knew a bit about your background – were you in another cult, if not the fellowship? – things would become a little clearer…

“Was it C influence telling me that it is hard to leave the cult? Or my own mind’s creation?”

Far be it from me to tell anyone else what ‘C-influence’ should be for them.
Let’s keep it simple. There have been many, many people on the blog that say that exactly these kinds of synchronous perceptions occured before, during and after being in the FoF. The only difference is while in the Fof they were cultivated in a particular way toward a particular end- manipulation and fear.

If they continue occuring after leaving the Fof and after ‘C-influence’ has ‘released’…(oops)…. (sorry, writing about this nonsense made me throw up in my mouth a little)… someone then WTF?

As I see it, all ‘angels’ and ‘demons’ exist in our minds. It is just that there is a lot more to our minds than we ‘know’. We need to stand up to them once and a while and not just kiss their asses…maybe even wrestle a few.

My sense is that the FOF is getting stronger despite the blog, the petition and members leaving. Sorry to rain on your party! I am not trying to poke at you neither am I interested in patriotism torward the FOF.

The blog seems to be a necessary place for ex members to get things off their chest; but to me it seems strangely ironic to come back and see the same posters singing the same tune of blame, judgement, injustice and utter subjectiveness.

Some ex members have escaped FOF externally, but only to find another trap (the blog).

“My sense is that the FOF is getting stronger despite the blog, the petition and members leaving. Sorry to rain on your party! I am not trying to poke at you neither am I interested in patriotism toward the FOF.”

Glad to hear it. Narrowness has a kind of strength, and the flame often burns brighter just before it goes out. I guess we’ll have to see what happens…

Hi Fat Boy
Would that be “fun” you were trying to poke at us?
Knowing the teacher you emulate, its more than likely your dick.
What are you interested in exactly?
Divine penis? I mean presence. oops Freudian slip.
jx
ps hope these genital terms haven’t offended your extreme sensitivities.
These things are best kept private, behind closed, “locked” doors?

“I have made more mistakes than all of you, but I have never repeated them“, Guess Who!

I am grateful for that silly quote which raised a big fat red flag.
I realize now that at a certain point I did not really take him seriously.
I was afraid of him and I mistook that for strength.
How silly of me!
So I used a few I`s. Bad, bad ? So photograph me!
Catch me if you can.
Cheers!

‘The blog seems to be a necessary place for ex members to get things off their chest; but to me it seems strangely ironic to come back and see the same posters singing the same tune of blame, judgement, injustice and utter subjectiveness.’

And your statement, above, is not ‘singing the same tune of blame, judgement, injustice and utter subjectiveness.’??? You just want to join the blog cult so badly that, like a chameleon*, you readily adopt the stripes of the environment you find yourself in. Certainly this disease was caught as a contagion from some earlier infected person(s) in another cult.

* cha·me·leon
Pronunciation: \kə-‘mēl-yən\
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: Middle English camelion, from Middle French, from Latin chamaeleon, from Greek chamaileōn, from chamai on the ground + leōn lion.
Date: 14th century
1: any of a family (Chamaeleontidae) of chiefly arboreal Old World lizards with prehensile tail, independently movable eyeballs, and unusual ability to change the color of the skin.

I like that part about ‘prehensile tail;’ or, in other words: ‘grasping tail.’ The whole definition describes well the leader of the pack, don’t you think? Is it possible to herd reptilian brains? Join the clubs!

261. Daily Cardiac – November 12, 2008 – Elena – 258
“Only if the individual you are conveying these things to has an open mind.”

Dearest,

Do you mean an open mind to be brainwashed? To agree because you are the authority speaking? Do you mean, an open mind because one is already paying to believe and has to believe because one is paying? Bound to the instinctive center so that you can justify the pocket? The only one’s left in the Fellowship are those still holding to the possibility of not having wasted their investment, but investing in brothels is a risky business.

You are already addicted to the blog because you love participating. You learnt all of Girard’s tapes so that you could participate in the Fellowship and repeat them here but as you go along you realize that you can be more of yourself and no one will throw you out. You’re not threatened in this blog community even if you’re deeply questioned. How much more open do you want it love?

Thank you for talking to me! It’s exhilaritingly human of you! Welcome to the dance in the Public Square!

Fat Boy,
You’re right, we left the Fellowship to blog ourselves to life!
“My sense is that the FOF is getting stronger despite the blog, the petition and members leaving. Sorry to rain on your party! I am not trying to poke at you neither am I interested in patriotism torward the FOF.”

What you sense is that those in the inner circle holding it together are having to put out more of themselves to convince those who live off of it and pay with their flesh, that they won’t loose the brothel and the blind supporters think that they are fighting the battle of their lives. We all love to feel heroic Fatty but at least we’re fighting so that you stop raping people, while you’re fighting so that you can continue to do so. The cause matters dear. It’s the only thing that matters, because you get criminals to defend sick causes much more easily than you can get heroes to defend the right cause. But the law exists, even for pimps.

OK, Good, you’ve got the bending over part down,
But I can sense that you’re not relaxed and totally comfortable with “the postion”.
When was the last time either of you made a monetary payment?
Oh, right, you guys are both paid whores/pimps.

Tatyana:
“Was it C influence telling me that it is hard to leave the cult? Or my own mind’s creation?”

I have been reading your posts with keen interest. I pray that you consider that it was the cult indoctrinationed fear that was telling you it was hard to leave. Let your conscience be your guide. Burton only cares about the people who agree with him.

Pick any number, endow it with meaning and you will see the number at moments like you mentioned. It’s called, “ideas of reference.”

For a long time believing in C Influence was a big part of my life. Why did I believe in these things?
In the invisible beings that control our lives and organize shocks, called C Influence.
How many times we were told that one must be in good householder with Influence C. One must do what Influence C wishes and not what one wishes. ‘Will of Influence C’. ‘Losing miraculous Influence C’. ‘Without C Influence the school would make no sense’. ‘Do not toast for C Influence if you do not want brutal shocks’ (next time you have dinner with current members try to make a toast for the Gurdjieff – they won’t drink!). C Influence send messages and shocks in the form of license plates etc. They also sign their “work”.
We are suggestible. As in this video when people are given a text of the reverse song, they can hear it!
Does believing in Gods and miracles make us better people – more sensitive and kind? Or more confused and fearful?
For me personally re-examining my belief in C influence was work on lying.

Yes Tatyana, good lighting and those other lines of dogma which said that “Justice doesn’t exist” and “too bad for you if you’re right”
which were hammered so often towards the end when we started getting restless!

Saturday evenings [at the Prieuré] there would be communal Turkish baths first for men and then the women, followed by a feast and ritual toasting of the Idiots. Referred to as The Science of Idiotism, Gurdjieff maintained that this was an initiate ritual that had been practiced for 4,500 years and expressed the secrets of the inner life of Man. It was never to be practiced apart from the sacramental meal and always with alcohol, never wine. There are 21 different Idiots with Gurdjieff being number 18; 19 and 20 are Sacred Individuals performing functions in the whole Megalocosmos; and 21 is the Unique Idiot, our God.
After hearing the toasts to the various Idiots at one meal, at the next Gurdjieff asked students to pick their Idiot, as everyone was one. (The Greek root meaning of the word is “I make my own.”) They were to choose from the first twelve Idiots. These were:
Ordinary Idiot
Super Idiot
Arch Idiot
Hopeless Idiot
Compassionate Idiot
Squirming Idiot
Square Idiot
Round Idiot
Zigzag Idiot
Enlightened Idiot
Doubting Idiot
Swaggering Idiot
Each had its particular designation. The movements of the Idiots was not forward but backward from the Idiot they chose to Ordinary Idiot. The reason was that only in the recognition of one’s nothingness could there be true development toward consciousness and conscience. Otherwise, all forward movement was certain to be stopped by a “wrong crystallization”; that is a fusion of a particular level of consciousness on the basis of false personality. If such a crystallization is not dissolved before a given Idiot is reached, it may become insurmountable. This is because this very defect, or defects, was a definite factor in the original ascent. Interestingly, the limitation of a wrong crystallization is not realized until the results that such a crystallization produces have been observed.
Only through work on oneself – the correct remembering and observing of oneself – does one automatically descend to Ordinary Idiot. Once the level of Ordinary Idiot has been recognized and reached, the ascension is also automatic. Every two or three years a new Idiot is reached – Super becomes Arch, Arch becomes Hopeless, Hopeless becomes Compassionate, and so on.
The ritual itself was simple. At the beginning of the meal, the Director proposed a toast, “To the health of all Ordinary Idiots.” If a person was present who had chosen or been designated as an Ordinary Idiot, the Director added, “And to your health also,” saying the name of the person. Letting a few minutes go by, the Director then proposed a second toast, “To the health of all Super Idiots,” and so on.
William P. Patterson – Ladies of the Rope

Hmmn!
“An Iraqi puppy called Ratchet will be re-united with a US soldier who adopted him in Iraq, after an international petition.
More than 65,000 people signed the online form urging the US Army to let the puppy go to the United States.
An animal rescue group picked up the dog, which was adopted by Army Specialist Gwen Beberg of Minneapolis in a case that highlighted military rules barring troops from caring for pets while in Iraq.
The US military has now said the dog is free to leave but American troops would not be responsible for its transportation.
It was the third try by Operation Baghdad Pups to get Ratchet out of the country on behalf of Beberg – the operation has cost an estimated $5,000.
Beberg and another soldier say they rescued the puppy from a burning pile of rubbish in May.”
I think we need better publicity.
l j x

It feeds people’s imaginary picture of kindness to support such actions for puppies. What is amazing is that of all the orphan children in Irak today, no one has had a similar move to rescue even one of them.

And very few will want to know or get involved in institutional rape and exploitation. The dirty job is for people without fear of doing it.

I was speaking metaphorically, a level often lost on the blog. But then maybe you were being facetious.

You are indeed a funny guy; I just wonder if you ever (can) turn off the humor. A lot of comedians end up tragically self destructing. They put off the serious side of life and make a joke of everything; but in the end they have no punch line for death.

285 Daily Cardiac
You think only FOFfers can ‘prepare for death’ as though they will beat it, by ‘swishing off’ into the next (maybe ninth) lifetime. A lovely woman I knew at the council offices here in Exeter said she wanted the song ‘Time to Say Goodbye’, sung by Sarah Brightman, played at her funeral. I cannot but think there is purpose in all sentient beings, to which Buddha urged us to be compassionate. You ‘prats’ in the Cult don’t have an inner line on life. Life by its very nature is eternal – the only purpose in becoming conscious is that, in death, one will have choice. Think about this before replying…..Nigel.

I experienced in my life that the majority of the people tends in different degrees towards this behavioural pattern. Most people are highly suggestible.
Manipulators work in our societies everywhere

This is a passage from an essay by JEANNE DE SALZMANN, who oversaw the continuation of Gurdjieff’s work after his death:

“Try for a moment to accept the idea that you are not what you believe yourself to be, that you overestimate yourself, in fact that you lie to yourself. That you always lie to yourself every moment, all day, all your life… You will see that you are two…One who lies and one who cannot endure lies…Learn to look until you have seen the difference between your two natures, until you have seen the lies, the deception in yourself. When you have seen your two natures, that day, in yourself, the truth will be born.”

Does that sound reasonable? If yes, you may start working. If no, you may doubt and keep it in your mind or you may probe into it or you may forget it.

“Gurdjieff held in particular disdain the “cerebrotonic” or “intellectual” type as exemplified by the “absent-minded professor”, and he seemed to relish putting such people to work at Fontainebleau digging enormous ditches, which he would have them fill back in the following morning;” Whitall Perry, Gurdjieff in the light of tradition.

Does that sound sadistic? No, intellectuals tend to neglect fitness.

Be sure we are all fragile under unusual circumstances.

Gurdjieff’s favourite symbol was the Enneagram and a colleague of mine has a friend (a psychiatrist) who lost his inner self in the work with the Enneagram. He is no longer able to practice his profession.

But I don’t think all 4. Way Groups are “cults”. It depends on the students, the teacher, the transfer, the circumstances. Crazy-wisdom methods are double-edged.

The FOF is a celestial money making labyrinth and I am happy that you are out!

Gurdieff quoted: “I am skeptic”; “Believe nothing, not even yourself”

Voltaire:

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Gurdjieff might have spoken:

The art of awakening consists in amusing the student while movements cure the mechanical routines. And a toast on the meme grifter idiots.

This is from the journal of the English traveller Olly Steed who with his friend Mark lived with the Mek tribe in the Rain Forest.

“The following day, Philemon arrived and was greeted by the Merengmen Elders with a level of respect I had not yet witnessed. Before I could really work out what was going on, the entire village was gathered around him asking him to heal them. Beyond being just a man with ‘old eyes’, Philemon was also one of very few traditional healers, a kind of witch doctor. Markus would be treated first. He was complaining of a pain in his lower back. Philemon rubbed the area with a wet banana leaf and began sucking on the diagnosed area. Then the Chief’s wife, Qarang – a pain in her shoulder – the same sucking treatment was prescribed – then the Elders – Jonas (sore arse) and Kornelius (arm) and on Philemon went with the sucking. I thought I’d witnessed a lot of things in life, but I am often reminded by the immortal words of Team America: World Police that there is always more to life: ‘if you haven’t seen a grown man eat his own head, you haven’t seen everything’. But there are few things in life that can prepare you for the surreal sight of one man sucking on another man’s arse, surrounded by a village hushed in reverence. But as Dr. Hunter Thompson famously said: ‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro’, and Philemon as if well versed in the doctrine of gonzo, ramped up the levels by spitting out everything he had ‘sucked’ out of the bodies of his patients. Covered in his saliva, his banana leaf plate was swimming with small pieces of wood and dead insects. To those of skeptical mind, Philemon perhaps belonged better suited in a restrictive white jacket, and homed in a white padded cell. Even if you’re not versed in the basic skills of illusion and magic, I thought it was pretty clear what he was doing – he had placed the wood and insects in his mouth before the ‘healing’. But as is often the case in misunderstanding, that is simply what I see through my eyes, through the eyes of the Mek, Philemon was a healer and he was genuinely healing them.

Although the skin was never broken, some felt the pieces come out through their skin, others felt heat, some wet (probably Philemon’s tongue), but to a person, their pains were gone and they believed they were healed. Philemon is a faith healer, and where there are no doctors, nor hospitals for miles, here belief is the only medicine. The ‘placebo’ effect can and does work even in the western world, so there is some method in this madness, although perhaps George Bernard Shaw should have the last word on this: “the fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic, is no more to the point that a drunk man is happier than a sober one”.

“The blog seems to be a necessary place for ex members to get things off their chest; but to me it seems strangely ironic to come back and see the same posters singing the same tune of blame, judgement, injustice and utter subjectiveness.”

These “same posters” are the very ones who finally convinced me to leave. So, “same posters”, keep doing your dharma (duty). We all benefit from your service.

In this last post you’re talking to us without defending the Fellowship which is so rare in you. Even if it isn’t the sweetest dialogue between the two of you, you’re talking about you and not the tapes, you’re defending yourself and not the Fellowship. You sound human and not just a programmed Robot like most of us were!
Thank you. It is good to not hear the dogma coming out of your voice. I know it is not like we’ve won you over, I’m not that naive but I’m very glad for you anyway. If Girard could do half your process, he’d still have a chance… to suffer a great deal less when the Fellowhship closes down.

The decision to stay or leave the FOF is a stuggle for the ex members as well as a stuggle for current members. I think trusting yourself should be the main focus rather than relying on others to “convince” you.

Sometimes we shy behind words like “convince” when we really mean “I got loved really good that time God, would you please do it again, I think I forgot the last part?”

I love flowers not because I have to trust myself, it’s not about me or trust; it’s just a fact that the beauty of them “convinced” me far ahead of my inner processes, i.e., they just walk on in, through the bolted doors, the mental processes, the gut, the glory and the contradictions, to simply be where they have always been, right here, in me, as I am, as you are…

Sometimes trying to have as the “main focus” myself so to trust myself, I can’t see the mouse for the hole…

Some of my greatest moments with friends have been those who have somehow managed to enter my house through the root cellar hatch, from beyond the peripheral; we weren’t taught too much about real love in school, though that’s just how it goes down here: sometimes, as a “Lovedog” (via Rumi’s definition), you’ve got to lick the trash can lid first to figure out what kind of restaurant you’re dealing with…